The Heck With Spring Cleaning
A review of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
By Julia A. Keirns
Mole wakes up in the spring, and instead of spring cleaning his little home, scrapes and scratches and scrabbles and scrooges out the hole and goes off on an adventure with his friend Rat across the riverbank, the open road and the wild wood.
This is one classic book that I have to admit I struggled with. Written in 1908, it is famous and has been made into several movies, but in my opinion, it is not the easiest to read and understand. I found myself having to go back and reread much of it in order to follow the storyline. I just found that I struggled with a lot of the sentences and paragraphs. I am not so sure this was originally written to be an actual children’s book, read by children. Maybe it started out that way, but I feel this book is just too difficult to follow in some chapters. It contains many slow-moving parts with long unending sentences that I was tempted to just skip…
“The front door of the hollow tree faced eastwards, so Toad was called at an early hour; partly by the bright sunlight streaming in on him, partly by the exceeding coldness of his toes, which made him dream that he was at home in bed in his own handsome room with the Tudor window, on a cold winter’s night, and his bedclothes had got up, grumbling and protesting they couldn’t stand the cold any longer, and had run downstairs to the kitchen fire to warm themselves; and he had followed, on bare feet, along miles and miles of icy stone-paved passages, arguing and beseeching them to be reasonable.”
That excerpt is one whole sentence…which has way too many commas in it. I had to reread it three times just to get my bearings to determine what the purpose of it was and to even remember that Toad was woken early. If you want to write a children’s book for children to understand, I think the sentences should be a bit shorter. I can see this book being read to children at bedtime one or two chapters at a time, but I think younger children will struggle with it.
Besides all that, it is a fun story of four characters Mole, Badger, Rat and Toad who have adventures and stick up for each other. It is full of adventure and friendship. Toad is the one who gets into all sorts of trouble and even ends up in prison for a time. When he comes back home, he finds that his home, Toad Hall, has been taken over by the wicked weasels. These four unconventional friends work together to help Toad get his home back. There is a wonderful story in the words of these pages if you can just read between the lines and find it.
I like a more fast-moving story that keeps the action moving and flowing myself. For me, it just had way too much detail that went off topic. I completed this book, and I still think it is a great classic that everyone should read at least once in their lifetime. I have now done that. Actually, with all of the rereading I had to do, I probably read it two or three times. Therefore, I will probably never read it again.