Tucker’s Countryside – Vintage Kidlit Summer Week #8

My friend Faith Elizabeth Hough (who blogs HERE) and I decided to create a fun reading challenge called Vintage Kidlit Summer. If you missed any of the details on how this challenge works, just go here and you can catch up! Basically, we’re doing 12 categories over 12 weeks, and each week has its own theme. All you have to do is choose a vintage/classic book that fits that week’s theme, read it, and share about it! You can write about it on your blog, or you can post your thoughts on Instagram (or Twitter) as well, by using the hashtag #vintagekidlitsummer. And if you’re in need of recommendations for each week’s theme, check out this blog post!

Our eighth week’s theme was Talking Animals, and for this theme I chose to re-read Tucker’s Countryside by George Selden. It’s the sequel to The Cricket in Times Square, but I read Tucker’s Countryside before Cricket so I don’t really feel that you need to read them in order! This book is actually one of the first longer books I read as a child (I was maybe seven or eight?), so it was fun to revisit. (I was a very choosy reader as a child. I read slowly, so a book needed to be *amazing* for me to even consider finishing it.)

I can totally see why I enjoyed this one so much. It’s a quick, fun, engaging read centering on the characters from Cricket (Chester, Tucker, and Harry) as they attempt to save an endangered meadow full of animals from certain destruction (an apartment building is going to be erected soon). The climax is wonderful: Tucker, a very clever mouse, gets the idea to make it look as if the meadow is a site of “historical significance”—in other words, the original homestead of the town founder—and how the animals accomplish this feat and get away with the “deception” is quite hilarious and well-written.

One of things I like best about Cricket and what I also love here is the juxtaposition of animals and people. They are books that keep you equally invested in the human and animal characters, and they don’t feel like fantasies at all. They’re extremely realistic—well, except for the town making such a big assumption about a certain historical site … 😉

This was a delightful reread, and now I want to revisit the other books in the series!

What did you read for the Vintage Kidlit Summer this week? Let me know in the comments!