Why You Shouldn’t Let Your Kids Read “Pippi Longstocking”
This classic might be more problematic than you recall!
I was about to head out the door to donate some old books I hadn’t read in many, many years when my mother stopped me. “Where are you taking Pippi Longstocking?”
“Oh, do you want to keep it? I was just going to give it away.”
“Maybe we should trash it instead.”
I gazed at my mother — a writer, and professor of literature — in pure shock. Never, in my entire life, had I heard her suggest throwing a book in the trash. “What? Why?”
She then told a story I had never heard before: she explained that one day, when I was around five or six, she had walked in on me in my bedroom jumping on my bed and screaming. She asked what I was doing, and I responded that I was pretending to be a cannibal from the Congo. Astonished, she asked where I had heard that the Congo was full of cannibals, and I pointed to my half-read copy of Pippi Longstocking.
Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren, was published in 1950 in Swedish, and has since been translated into 76 languages. It is widely regarded as a classic, and a children’s lit treasure. Pippi, with her bright orange braids, wonky manners, and the monkey on her shoulder, is an iconic…
