Such a delightful, fun, classic read. I have enjoyed reading about the Peppers and I am excited to watch and observe their journey as they grow up. Phronsie is a darling as ever and you can't help but fall in love with her sweet ways. Polly is in the stages of adolescence where a girl wants longs for friends and where those friends might easily sway her, but Mrs. Pepper and Papa Doctor Fisher always keep her in check. Jasper can always be depended on, and Mr. King is quite funny in his old, grumpy way. As this book is a lot about their tour to Europe, I sure wish I could take a similar tour as well. Maybe someday.

One of my new favorites in the Five Little Peppers series, it’s an adorable story of the Peppers in the Netherlands and France

In the 1980s, my grandma took me to a consignment store and bought this book for me, and I still own it. I don't remember anything about the story, but every time I see it on my shelf I think of my grandma and our adventures in thrift shopping. <3

In the back matter of this book there's an ad for another Sidney title, promised to be good reading "for all who love simplicity, truth, and cheerfulness."* This has all that in spades but also has this overly hearty, knowing tone, as if all readers could be expected to have gone to Switzerland and to know the old college songs. A breathless quality. Too many jollies, especially when the jollies become reactionary.




*Which I do, obviously. Especially cheerfulness.

Children learning good character...

It's so refreshing to see moral character valued. I so enjoy a job that centers on the moral of the story. Every child should read, or be read, books from this time period. The world would be a better place.

Oh my, how I loved this books as a child. They were very dear to me and are firmly entrenched into my memory strong enough to have become parts of my character. There are is a veritable plethora of life examples and lessons to be learned through these works of literature that take us back to a simpler time and place, entirely different family values and senses or morality and ethics; there is much to be learned from these simple books. Most of all, family and love, loyalty and a moral compass much needed in today's society, camaraderie and ...well, the list is entirely too long. I think the books are relevant to the youth of today, if nothing else to provide an example that though some things change with time, a great many others do not.

Good series

Love, love, love this series....

Please see my review for Midway as it applies to this title too.

I am just not finding Sidney’s take on the children when they’re older to be realistic or likable - an eight year old Phronsie is stilled being babied and Polly, now fifteen, seems more childish then she did in the first book at age twelve.

For this reason, I’ll give Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House a try (as the children are the age in the first book) before completely stopping with this series (even though I own copies of four other titles).

Cleanliness: nothing to note.

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Seeing Europe through the eyes of Polly and Phronsie was fun, but the constant buying of things over relishing the places got in the way of the story quite a bit. Sometimes Polly can be a bit whiny, and Phronsie a bit too weepy. The addition of the Selwyns to the story was wholesome.

Review of the Kindle Edition of this nineteenth-century children's classic

This is Book 3 (in terms of events, not when the author wrote it) in the Five Little Peppers series of nineteenth century children's books. (I've provided a complete list of the Pepper books below.)

I was delighted to discover I could instantly download to my Kindle what I presume is the Project Gutenberg free version of this nineteenth century children's classic. The formatting is what I'm coming to see as typical of these free versions. Though there are few typos, there are frequent missing tabs and/or hard returns to set off paragraphs from each other, which makes readability a bit difficult.

This book continues the adventures of the Pepper family of five children and their widowed mother, whom they call "Mamsie," and the millionaire, "old Mr. King," and his son Jasper King. Mrs. Pepper is Mr. King's housekeeper, but the Pepper children all call him Grandpapa, since he has informally adopted the Pepper children. Most especially Phronsie, whom he absolutely adores and endlessly showers with dolls.

The events of this book occur immediately after the end of Book 2. In this book, Mrs. Pepper is now married to kind Dr. Fisher of Book 1, who saved Polly's eyes when she got the measles. Mr. King decides to take Dr. and Mrs. Fisher, Polly, Phronsie, Jasper and Reverend and Mrs. Henderson (who were neighbors and friends of the Peppers in Book 1) on a tour of Europe.

The story is written in omniscient point of view, as are the other two books, so we get to experience the thoughts of many different characters, but Polly remains the key character in this book as in the others. Once again, everyone who meets her adores Polly for her bright smiles and kind nature--which we are, as always, made to understand that she owes to the influence of her down-to-earth, compassionate, hard-working mother.

Though the story reads like an historical novel to modern readers, it was actually a contemporary novel when it was written in 1902. There are horse-drawn carriages instead of cars, gaslight instead of electric lamps, no running water, no refrigeration, no central heating, and the traveling party gets to Europe on a "steamer," presumably an ocean liner run with a steam engine.

As the title of the book states, there are five siblings:

Polly (Mary) is 14, and midway through the book she turns 15.

Ben (Ebenezer) is now presumably 16, or nearly so, because he is a year older than Polly. Ben is one of my favorite characters, and I'm sorry to say that other than at the very beginning of the book, we don't see much of him in this book since he he has a job he doesn't want to leave to go to Europe.

Joel is now presumably 12 or 13, because he is two years younger than Polly. He, too, is not onstage except at the beginning of this book because he is left behind to go to boarding school.

Davie (David) is now presumably 10 or 11 years old, because he is two years younger than Joel. He, too, is left behind to go to school.

Phronsie (Sophronia) was four at the time of Book 1, but is listed as being only eight in this book as she was in Book 2, even though Book 2 says five years have passed since Book 1. She continues in the roll of the adored baby of the family. She is so beautiful, strangers stop on the street to stare at her, but she continues to have an angelic disposition to go with her celestial beauty.

Jappy (Jasper) King is now 17, since he is two years older than Polly, and he is not in school nor, unlike Ben, going to any kind of job. In this book Mr. King's source of wealth still isn't mentioned, but it is clear by his actions and lofty attitude that he comes from "old money." (It is not until Book 4, Five Little Peppers Grown Up, that we learn for a fact that Mr. King has never worked a day in his life and believes, much like European aristocrats and nobility of that era, that soiling his hands with "trade" would be beneath him.)

A lot of this story reads like a fascinating travelogue of what it was like to take the Grand Tour of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. However, there are plenty of fun adventures caused by the Pepper girls' taking under their wing many troubled fellow travelers. These include a sick old man who turns out to be an earl who is on their ocean liner incognito; the earl's incorrigible, teenage grandson; an artistic orphan girl age fourteen, and an impoverished father of starving children who mugs Mr. King and Phronsie in a Parisian park.

In this book as in the previous two, Mr. King's age is still never given, and he is constantly referred to by the author as "old Mr. King," but he's mighty spry. He loves having Phronsie sit on his lap (indeed, in the later books, she continues to sit on his lap even when she is an adult, which you would think would be very hard on an old man's body to bear that kind of weight).

Margaret Sidney was the pseudonym of successful, American children's author, Harriett Mulford Stone Lothrop, who was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1844 and died in 1924, eight years after writing the last Pepper book. She began her writing career in 1878 at age 34 by publishing stories about Polly and Phronsie Pepper in a Boston children's magazine. She married the magazine's editor, Daniel Lothrop, who began a publishing company and published Harriett's "Five Little Peppers" series, starting in 1881. Here is a list of the 12 Pepper books by date written, which were produced over the course of 35 years:

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881)
Five Little Peppers Midway (1890)
Five Little Peppers Grown Up (1892)
Five Little Peppers: Phronsie Pepper (1897)
Five Little Peppers: The Stories Polly Pepper Told (1899)
Five Little Peppers: The Adventures of Joel Pepper (1900)
Five Little Peppers Abroad (1902)
Five Little Peppers At School (1903)
Five Little Peppers and Their Friends (1904)
Five Little Peppers: Ben Pepper (1905)
Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House (1907)
Five Little Peppers: Our Davie Pepper (1916)

Margaret Sidney originally had no plans to write more Pepper books after the fourth book, "Phronsie Pepper", was published in 1897, which she states in her introduction to that book. However, over time the pleas of avid fans from all over the world caused her to give in and write eight more Pepper books. The events in the last eight books take place before the events of the third book in the original series of four books. If you would like to read the six main Pepper books in chronological order, rather than by publication date, this is the ideal sequence:

"Five Little Peppers and How They Grew"
"Five Little Peppers Midway"
"Five Little Peppers Abroad"
"Five Little Peppers and Their Friends"
"Five Little Peppers Grown Up"
"Five Little Peppers: Phronsie Pepper"

If you read all the Pepper books, you will discover that the author did not take great care as to continuity in the later books, perhaps because so many years passed between writing these books. The Pepper books are products of a much slower-paced era, and it is relaxing to experience that approach to children's fiction while being warmly enfolded into the loving Pepper family.

This book, and all the Pepper books, are strictly G-rated, and the values they show (not tell through preaching) are very useful ones for any child to be exposed to, including civility, kindness, gratitude, consideration, keeping commitments, accepting difficult circumstances without complaint and forging through them with good cheer.

I highly recommend this book for all ages.

2 stars
I'm not sure if I finished this.