She's optimistic and caring in fact she's very thoughtful of other people, stands up to bullies and criminals, and tries to cheer up those around her. Besides, Pippi's not just like a female Dennis the Menace. When she plays around with a bull or a tiger or a shark or a pistol, the grownup part of my brain telling me that this is wrong and dangerous for a child to do is drowned out by my feeling childlike fancies that I'd long thought were dormant. Uncontrollable and unmanageable, she is every kid's dream. But that is precisely why she is so beloved. People will say Pippi is too independent, too irresponsible, too thoughtless, too much of a bad influence. She wants to be a pirate when she grows up, or maybe a real, proper lady in her unique way if she can pull it off (no chance, since she's as free as a bird), or maybe she doesn't want to grow up at all. Traditional gender roles do not apply to the marvelous Pippi Longstocking. Without adult authority figures, she can manage fine on her own. She can lift and toss around anything and anyone. She speaks her mind, makes up her own games and routines, is highly creative and imaginative, tells fibs for the fun of it, doesn't go to school (or only when she feels like it), has had lots of exciting adventures overseas already (her father was a sea captain), and is physically the strongest person in the world. She's nine-years-old and lives alone with a monkey and a horse in a house in the outskirts of a little Swedish town. Pippi Longstocking was created in 1945, and she is every bit a strong independent girl who lets no one tell her what to do or how to live her life. There's no nauseating preaching or teaching about goodness/Christianity/ladylike manners like in so much of classic children's literature.
Episodic with no obvious morals, and that's okay. Because Astrid Lindgren's classic books are for the inner child in all of us.Īll three books in the 'Pippi Longstocking' series are just the right kind of fun, over-the-top silliness, like a comic strip. Pippi would have been one of my childhood literary heroines alongside Matilda Wormwood.īut it doesn't really matter that, in my mid twenties, I only just now started reading 'Pippi Longstocking'.
If I had read 'Pippi Longstocking' when I was very young, I'm sure I'd have loved it.
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