I never read any of the Freddy books as a youth. I don’t know why. I suspect that the local library failed to stock them.
A family friend gave our Perfect Non-Reader Freddy Goes to Florida, which we read as a bedtime book, both introduced to it together. I thought it was fairly good, my Perfect Non-Reader seemed to enjoy it a lot. I understand that this is a sort of background, and that the characters develop and change quite a bit over the twenty-six books in the series, which I think is a good thing. I liked some of the situations the animals found themselves in (an ad-hoc parade through Washington DC culminating in meeting the President, the burglar’s hideout, the poachers), but the ways they got out of their predicaments lacked the oomph, the hallucinatory logic, that would move the book over the hilarity line. Painting themselves worked well, particularly when they were unable to un-paint themselves, but then their remaining paint didn’t really cause them any further trouble (other than a stiff bath later).
An odd thing—knowing that there are twenty-four more Freddy stories put a probably unreasonable burden on the first one. Particularly as the books are Not All the Same, One to Another. There are bound to be good ones and bad ones. The first one is more likely to be a bad one, at least in the sense that Walter R. Brooks won’t have really settled into his style yet. It’s different in a trilogy, of course, where the second is likely to be much worse than the first, and the third worse yet, but if you know there are twenty-odd books in a series, it’s fair to guess that there’s a sort of curve, where the author improves over the first few before peaking somewhere and then beginning to churn out inferior hackwork towards the end. Right? And yet when I read the first of a long series, I am likely to give it a quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and that’s the end of that.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.