A bit like a warm hug.

A mixture of Little Women, Little Men, Anne of Green Gables and Pollyanna

I read this whole series and really enjoyed it; I still have 5 or 6 of the books I had when I was a kid. I haven’t perused them lately, but I’m not convinced they’d hold up for today’s young readers.

Read this! It's so pleasant!

Finished at last! I loved going through this with my youngest sister and rediscovering the world of the Peppers through her eyes. Definitely a classic everyone should read!

I didn't think that I would like this book. I just read it because I needed to read something that was in my level for school and this was the first book I could find. It was really kind of cute though. I was surprised. The name sounds dumb but it's actually a fun play on words because although it suggests it, this book has nothing whatsoever to do with vegetables. It's actually about five little kids and their last name is Pepper. It was cute and I enjoyed it.

I just read a copy that my Mom bought when I was growing up but hadn't read at the time. It's a great story about how a widowed mother with five young children make do with very little income and learn to be happy.

my all time favorite children's book

The five little Peppers are the sweetest, most responsible and helpful children in the world who are always happy even though they are very poor. The perfection of the Pepper children gets a little corny, but the stories about them are cute and fun to read, and there is a surprising plot twist at the end!

Perhaps it's because I didn't encounter this until I was all grown up. Perhaps it's because the narrator gave the world's worst voices to the littlest Peppers. Perhaps it's because of the verbal quirks that Margaret Sidney probably meant to be charming, but which become infuriating with constant repetition. It could be that, combined with all this, my daughter fell in love with it so that I was unable to swap it out for something tolerable on our drives to and from school.

Whatever the reason, I despised this book. Imagine someone taking Little Women, removing Jo, Laurie, or any other character who displays a flaw or anything else that might make them human, coating it in powdered sugar, and then drowning it in maple syrup. This is the most saccharine, sentimental piece of dreck I've encountered in ages. If I didn't know better, I would have thought it was a parody of Victorian children's fiction. The only relief I found before the book mercifully ended was that, in listening during "Mommy Time" to Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I, I found a kindred soul--she was thoroughly sympathetic to her Gammy's tendency to drop right to sleep whenever she was tasked with reading about the Five miserable Little Peppers.

Since there are Five Little Peppers and I have my own Five children, I thought this would be a pretty cute read.

I wish I could say I loved this book and that it was worth the time it took me to read it, but unfortunately, I can't. It was hard to get through. The conversations were difficult to read aloud, and I had to stop, repeatedly, to try to figure out what they were saying to explain it to my kids. This is not my first classic to read. I have never been so lost in a children's book, and not the magical kind of absorbed lost.

It wasn't bad, over all. There were some cute story lines, so I didn't hate it, it just wasn't my kind of book. I'm glad there are people out there who have read and adore this book. Every author pours their love and life into their work and it deserves to be appreciated.

Unfinished, not for me.

I read this because the Gilbreth children in Cheaper by the Dozen liked it, but I was disappointed. It seems like a lot of the plot and characters are ripped off from Louisa May Alcott's books Little Women and An Old Fashioned Girl, down to the oldest girl being named Polly! I checked, and both of these were published before the Five Little Peppers. Margaret Sidney even lived in the same area as Louisa May Alcott: Concord. Or maybe it's just that all of these books use common themes of 19th century literature for children.

In any case, Louisa May Alcott is a much better writer than Margaret Sidney. The Pepper children are just too perfectly good to be true, and none of the characters is particularly well-drawn. That said, it gives a realistic description of Polly as a "parentified child" who feels that her main purpose in life is to help her mother support the family. She is only persuaded to pursue her own education when she is convinced that her mother will be more distressed by her failure to do so than by the loss of her practical and emotional support.