Title: Pinocchio
Author: Carlo Collodi
Pages: 135
Finished: February 2, 2019
First Sentence: Centuries ago there lived-- "A king!" my little readers will say immediately.
Summary: Pinocchio, the little marionette who lives wants to be a good boy, but he's so stubborn, ill-mannered, and lazy that it's just so hard. He goes through many MANY hardships before he changes and becomes a good marionette. To reward him, the Fairy With Azure Hair makes him a real boy.
Thoughts: Collodi wrote Pinocchio as a serialized novel in 1883. The story originally ended at chapter 15 with a gruesome hanging, but was so well received that he continued. Up to this point, my only experience with Pinocchio was the Disney film. The book is... different.
First of all, it's writing is very similar to the Oz chronicles by Baum. It's simple and there's no why for anything. Things just are the way they are. An example. No one seems all that surprised that Pinocchio is a marionette or that he moves and talks. In fact, when he ends up in the Marionette show, all the other Marionette's are also walking and talking. The story is dark, but people get out of the situations fairly easily. Everything is told very matter-of-factly. For example, the escape from the shark is really quite uneventful. They climb up the shark's throat, and jump out while it's sleeping.
Like Oz, I figure it's probably more effective to a kid, but the kid that this would appeal to probably wouldn't be able to read it by themselves, so it's more of a readaloud.
The book was quick to read, but I wasn't a fan. I found myself constantly wondering WHY things worked and finding little bits of continuity error that annoyed me. I probably won't read it again.
This counts as a book in translation for my Back to the Classics challenge.
First of all, it's writing is very similar to the Oz chronicles by Baum. It's simple and there's no why for anything. Things just are the way they are. An example. No one seems all that surprised that Pinocchio is a marionette or that he moves and talks. In fact, when he ends up in the Marionette show, all the other Marionette's are also walking and talking. The story is dark, but people get out of the situations fairly easily. Everything is told very matter-of-factly. For example, the escape from the shark is really quite uneventful. They climb up the shark's throat, and jump out while it's sleeping.
Like Oz, I figure it's probably more effective to a kid, but the kid that this would appeal to probably wouldn't be able to read it by themselves, so it's more of a readaloud.
The book was quick to read, but I wasn't a fan. I found myself constantly wondering WHY things worked and finding little bits of continuity error that annoyed me. I probably won't read it again.
This counts as a book in translation for my Back to the Classics challenge.
I read this one a couple of years ago. Although not a favorite, it was interesting to see just how disturbing the original story was in comparison to the Disney version.
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