The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler WarnerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this because my 8-year-old son read it and loved it. This strikes me as the kind of book you have to read when you’re a kid though.
First, aside from the charm of living in an abandoned boxcar, which I totally get, there wasn’t much I enjoyed.
Second, none of the characters behave in a way explicable to adult readers. The children’s parents recently died but none of the children suffer ill-effects. None of the four are grief-stricken, shocked, regressing, or even irritable. None of the adults behave in explicable ways either. And [spoiler alert] the kids end up with a grandfather who is almost certainly an asshole as he has had no relationship with his four grandkids up until now.
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