John Lawrence Peterson (1924–2002)

I remember ordering this from the Scholastic catalog back in the early grades of school, and going through a phase of being quite obsessed with toy boats. I recall getting a bunch of little plastic ones from the spinning toy stand at the local corner store.

The nostalgia definitely helped, but this was a charming read, with efficient world building and a spirit of adventure. Perhaps a little too fast paced and light on character, but the Littles themselves come across as quite plucky, if a show more little indistinct.

Obviously intended for very young readers, and it had certainly caught my imagination back then, so I'd say job done. show less

My 6yo and her buddy have been obsessively playing "the littles" for months, and she just started reading them from her school library. I hadn't heard of them, so I picked one up to read it, and blech. The bland prose, the sexist characterizations ... I am making haste to check out The Borrowers by Mary Norton, which these books ripped off, and which I loved as a kid -- hopefully Ada will enjoy the original!

Somehow, this was a series that I had never heard of until I was in my 20’s, when my 8-year-old sister handed it to me and said, “You’ve got to read this!” Well, I still didn’t sit down to read it until my 5-year-old sister begged me to read it to her, and we got to enjoy it together.

This is a children’s book, no doubt about that. But, even as an adult, I can appreciate the amount of imagination and sheer delight in a crazy idea that went into the formation of these books. My show more sister was spellbound as I read it to her, and I admit, I was rooting for the Littles just as much as she was. The premise behind this series is way too much fun! We enjoyed sharing this story together. I’m sure this won’t be the last Littles book my sister and I read together. show less

Halloween books for October!

I'm not a fan of the Littles series, having read only one or two of them before, and this Halloween yarn does little to endear them to me.

The Littles are a family of very small people -- six inches and less -- who secretly live in the walls of a house owned by the Bigg family. (Littles? Biggs? I suspect some sort of . . . symbolism?)

The kids, Tom and Lucy Little, are meant to scare their family with a prank of some sort as part of the family's Halloween tradition. show more They do this since they are too small to go trick-or-treating and the little people are meant to keep themselves secret from the big people. ("Little people?" "Big people?" I suspect I'm on the verge of a breakthrough of some sort. Hmmm.) Before they can plan their prank, they are distracted by the arrival of an uncle, recently retired from a military force of little folk that fights mice in a trash pile, protecting the Trash Tinies who live there. Tom gets caught up in dreams of being a brave soldier in the army, but eventually comes up with a prank that backfires drastically.

Silly plot, poorly written. I do like Roberta Carter Clark's illustrations though. show less