I remember loving this book when my mom used to read it to me when I was a preschooler. Rereading as an adult, I can see why it was mother approved but it's not a very interesting book. I've seen other reviewers compare it to Louisa May Alcott or LM Montgomery, but I didn't really feel it was up to those standards.

The problem I had with it was the total angelic perfection of all the characters. The children never fought with each other, never sassed their mom, and were always hard-working and aware of the need to lighten their mother's load. There were no adult villains either, other than a very brief encounter with a cartoonish busy-body church lady. Even the supposedly curmudgeonly old man wasn't really a curmudgeon who needed to be won over by the children's goodness (a la Pollyanna). He merely needed the children to provide an opportunity for him to demonstrate the goodness that was there all along.

The problem with having all these shining examples of perfection for characters is that there is no room for growth. So you have a story with no conflict, no tension, no character development and growth...essentially, nothing happens in this story except a lot of poor long-suffering people being good.

All this is not to say that a kid wouldn't still like the book. After all, *something* about it drew me in when I was four years old and made it stick in my memory into adulthood. I'm just not sure what that was anymore.

I have an old "antique" (well, just really, really used) edition of this book that my grandmother handed down to me when I was a kid which I suspect added to the feeling that it took me back in time. I loved it. If you liked Alcott's An Old Fashioned Girl, you will like this. If you think those old novels for children about families overcoming hardship and learning to appreciate one another despite lack of material goods, etc., etc. are painfully cheesy you will not like this.

I am going to be unjust and give this one star. It's probably not that bad. What started out as a boring book became loathsome to me. My kids wanted to finish and that is the only reason I am finished it too.

A few complaints:

1) I feel like each chapter put me into a stupor. I would ask the kids for a narration after each reading--partly because I wanted to know what happened.

2) I had to explain to my kids from context clues about things in the story that weren't explained. Cherry is the name of Polly's bird. Polly randomly gets referred to by her actual name, Mary. Phronsie has a baby doll named Seraphina that is only referred to at Christmas time, but she has another doll named Baby already mentioned. It was bad enough that I borrowed an etext to look up who/what Seraphina was in case I missed something. It was weird.

I did not explain to the kids that Phronsie got kidnapped. That whole episode made no sense to me and still doesn't.

3) These kids have hysteria. No offense meant to all women and their uteruses. They weep at the slightest provocation or roll on the floor laughing and crying at things that are not even funny. Blech.

4) Poor David has no defining characteristics.

5) Mrs. Pepper is virtuous because she is not the type of person who wants charity. I get having pride and not expecting "hand-outs" but this attitude takes the "deserving" vs. "undeserving" poor, (a distinction I'm not comfortable with in the first place) one step further. Example: Don't give money to a people with credit card debt because they got into their financial straits themselves. (Undeserving poor) Give money instead to a widow with 5 kids who works and doesn't have any vice because it is not her fault her husband died (deserving poor) Except don't do that either because she is too much of a good woman to accept money from you. Yuck.

6) For some reason, Polly can be a musical prodigy in a matter of weeks? Months? I'm not clear how long she was meant to be staying with the Kings, but I didn't get the idea they meant to keep her long enough to truly learn piano well. There were so many vague details. Also, I found it a little strange that Polly was allowed to go. How in the world is Mrs. Pepper going to feed her other 4 children when Polly is the one who cooks and can do extra sewing for her?

I'm glad this is finally over.
I'm sorry to anyone who loved this.

My poor copy of this book, this edition, in fact, is so ragged. I’ve just read it to pieces, with a little help from siblings. It was a book that completely captured my imagination. I loved all the Peppers. Mr. King perfectly summed up my sentiments each time I picked up the book when he said, “Well, the fact of it is, I'm going to have them here for a visit—the whole of them, you understand; that's all there is to it.” Their adventures and sweet or naughty antics are an energetic glimpse into a deeply loving family. It made me want to be Polly. Somehow, she even made measles sound enviable. (Don’t ask how a child thinks. Even my nephews wanted to wear blindfolds as they read about her poor sick eyes.) So, maybe now I see a few plot holes that might not have been as noticeable to younger me, but did I care? No! It is just such a sweet story that any little weaknesses here or there are just not worth mentioning.
Don’t bother waiting till your little ones can read it for themselves. Read it to them now. They will love it and so will you.

This was nice and the writing was well done, but my kids were pretty bored with it. Read for homeschool Form 1b.

Five Little Peppers is an odd little book. It's sweet and charming, but also long and meandering, in the way that a six-year-old telling a story goes on and on about minute details and only eventually comes around to the point. It blends the very real hardships of poverty and illness with pat, idealized solutions (long-lost rich cousins!) that aren't quite believable.

That's not to say I didn't like the book--I did, and the girls all came around to it eventually as well. But it's not likely to become a family favorite.

The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
By Margaret Sidney

Summary:
First of all, negligent parenting practices abound in this children’s novel. Both Phronsie and Polly are lost sight of, wander off, almost get killed, are taken in by strangers, and in the case of Mr. King, get kidnapped by a sharp wit and persuasive tongue.

Second, Phronsie is treated like, and called “pet” throughout the book. It was quite demeaning.

Third, the book itself is written with constant interruptions in the author’s prose, as if suffering from ADHD:
1. Too many characters talking one after another, sometimes in rapid-fire succession.
2. Too many cut off sentences where another character speaks up to interrupt.
3. Too many commas used ubiquitously and without restraint.
4. Too many descriptions and additional contexts used in the middle of dialogue, fragmenting the speech in nearly every single quotation.
5. Too many paragraph transitions that make no sense.

On top of these grammatical nightmares, the novel also felt a lot like a “Little Women” clone with a family of 4 (Davie not really counting since he hardly ever spoke), a mom, and a friend they all shared. I felt like I’ve read it before.


The Good:
1. Unintended by the author I’m sure, but a typo in the edition I read listed Polly as “Potty”, to which my girls (of whom I was reading the book aloud to) cracked up laughing.
2. Might be a bad thing for some considering the book is written for children, but I learned a bunch of $5 words while reading this book.
3. I enjoyed Joel the most, a veritable Tom Sawyer.

The Meh:
1. The author seemed to have an attention-deficit complex in that she could never write a quotation without inserting a plot descriptor, a thought process, or other bits of oftentimes meaningless additions throughout it—and sometimes adding more than one breakage! I began skipping right to the resumption quotation with mostly no worse for wear.
2. The intermittently quaint, archaic, or just plain abnormal speech patterns of the author made things difficult to read. She added contractions and left off letters to words in many obscure ways.
3. The author would jump from one scene to another without any transition at all at times.
4. Davie got the short end of the stick in terms of character development.
5. Calling Phronsie the pet of the family felt demeaning to her.
6. Hearing Mr. King’s account of how he finagled Phronsie away from Mrs. Pepper so that she could visit with Polly at his house felt wretched and selfish of Mr. King.
7. The ending made no sense at all to me. The most insignificant character in the entire book-Cherry the bird-received the spotlight at the end. Who cares???

Conclusion:
The only reason I read this book to my girls, 5 and 2, is because my wife whole heartedly endorsed it from readings of herself as a kid. Alas, sometimes our memories of the past don’t hold up when revisited.

2.5 ⭐️

Great children’s classic. Perfect for the middle reader.

Read aloud to the kids. It was a heartwarming story about a lovely family. We all enjoyed it, though it won’t be one of my favorite children’s classics.

What a sweet, innocent read! It was fun to read about a family that enjoyed spending time together and truly loved one another. Their joy was not dependent on their circumstances, and they found delight in all.
Reading older language, as this book definitely adds its own challenge and takes an extra bit of finesse to read with ease.

I bought this book because I remember my Mom talking about reading it as a child. Oh dear. I would say that books have changed and Five Little Peppers is just a product of its time, except that the book was written AFTER Little Women. (And, Five Little Peppers, published in 1881, seems to have many, many similarities to Little Women, published in 1868. However, the author of FLP couldn’t seem to copy the warmth, complex characters, and rich detail of LW.)

2.5 stars.

Little Women 2.0 but not as good, it was a nice read though!