Pippi Goes On Board

Pippi Goes On Board by Astrid Lindgren hands 6 year olds the strongest, richest and least supervised child in a small Swedish town.

What happens

Pippi lives on her own at Villa Villekulla. There's a horse on the porch, a monkey called Mr Nilsson on her shoulder and a suitcase of gold coins under the bed.

No mother, no father, nobody to send her to bed. So she tells herself when to go, and the answer is usually about ten, because after seven is when the fun starts.

The first chapter introduces her from scratch, so your reader can start here quite happily.

Most of what follows is one enormous shopping trip into town with Tommy and Annika from next door.

She wades up the gutter pretending to be a boat, falls in, and calmly upgrades herself to a submarine. She reads a sign asking whether she suffers from freckles, goes in and tells the lady no, she loves them, and could she please order more if any come in.

She shakes hands with a shop dummy so warmly that its arm comes off, pays for the whole thing in gold and keeps just the arm.

Then she buys thirty-six pounds of sweets and hands them out to every child standing outside the window, empties most of the toy shop for them too, and buys the lot of them cuckoo whistles. The policeman arrives at about the point you'd expect.

She never keeps anything for herself. That's the part 6 year olds notice.

The best bit is that she's honest about her own whoppers. Halfway through a tall tale about a city where everybody has three arms, she stops and admits she's lying again, and then can't help making the correction into an even taller story.

One place this book shows its age. Pippi is certain her father was washed overboard and is now a cannibal king on an island, and the words cannibal and cannibal king turn up several times. It's dated colonial stuff and it sits there unexamined.

If you read aloud you can handle it in a sentence. If you'd rather not get into it with a 6 year old just yet, this is one to leave for a while.

The translation is American as well, so it's candy rather than sweets and Mama rather than Mum.

The father she's been imagining does eventually turn up, which puts the whole question of whether she stays at Villa Villekulla on the table.

What to read next

That question gets an answer in Pippi In The South Seas. Same house, same horse, same two next-door children, except this time a letter comes and they set off for her father's island.