Astrid Lindgren

Going to a little girl named Astrid. Great book series. Educational and well done for the young.

Leider nur auf Englisch, sonst super.

Great series of books!

I love these Little People Big Dreams books and so does my four year old. We have about 5, including this biography of Astrid Lindgren. Apart from recognizing her as the author of Pippi Longstocking, I knew nothing about Lindgren's life, so I found this as interesting as my son did. I like that they authors of this series choose diverse subjects, including people like Lindgren who may be very famous in Sweden, but is not well known in America.I was a little surprised that this book includes that Lindgren got pregnant at 19 and had a child out of wedlock and frames it as a good thing (well an example of her headstrong, iconoclast nature.) I have no issues, but I imagine others might not like it. Anyways, it's a simple biography of Lindgren's life, how she starts to love reading as a child and ends up creating Pippi after her child makes up the name and asks Astrid to tell a story about the Pippi Longstocking. That leads to lots of books and eventually movies starring the character.As with all these books, on the last two pages there is a short biography that is more complete along with pictures of Lindgren. We really enjoy these books. My son is always excited to get a new one. He looks at the pictures of the covers of them on the last pages and always picks out ones that he wants.

I found this book to be largely very charming (and as a former Pippi Longstocking fan, very interesting), but I'm an adult and I'm not at all sure it would be that appealing to the majority of children. I have generally found that children are far less interested in the authors of books than in the stories they tell. My son was an intense Harry Potter fan, but he was not one iota interested in JK Rowling's life story (which, to me, is incredibly interesting) until he was well beyond the age range targeted by this book.Beyond that, book baskets have always been my favorite go-to gifts for kids. However, when choosing books for children, I'm always concerned about the messages and types of role-modeling they might convey and if they comport with the values that parents are trying to instill. So while I very much enjoyed Astrid's story, I think there are aspects to it that might bear mentioning, such as:"But being a young adult meant that she could be a rebel!""At age 19, she become [sic] a single mom when her son, Lars, was born."Typo(!!) aside, there are parents who will be perfectly fine with that, but others who might not be terribly thrilled. It's a choice and probably depends on how impressionable parents think their young readers might be. And I say this as one who had too many aspiring-writer friends who honestly believed that in order to be a great writer, one basically had to become an alcoholic or hard drug-user, a la Hemingway and a host of others, as crazy as that seems.Overall, Lindgren's story is not what I expected it to be and there was much about it that was very interesting and fun to learn. But I'm an adult. I question how interesting it would be to those between the ages of 4 and 7.