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August 26, 2013 by Brigid Alverson

Review: The Boxcar Children Graphic Novels

August 26, 2013 by Brigid Alverson   4 comments

The Boxcar Children Graphic Novels
Based on the books by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Published by Albert Whitman and Company

The Boxcar Children were a beloved children’s series when I was growing up, and these graphic-novel adaptations have a sort of old-fashioned charm to them. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone to update them with things like cell phones or computers, which is fine.

I have to admit that the only Boxcar Children story I ever read was the first one, and that was many years ago, so I can’t compare these to the originals. However, they do seem to be direct adaptations of some of the prose books in the series. (Some of them were adapted by Rob Worley, who went on to write the delightful children’s comic Scratch 9.)

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Each book is about 32 pages long, which means there is about 25 pages of actual story, and each presents a fairly complex puzzle of a type that will be familiar to readers of Nancy Drew and other mysteries: There are false walls, missing items, and in one case, mysterious attempts to sabotage the local pizza parlor. The stories don’t seem to get particularly scary—strange noises from the ceiling and a broken gas line that puts the pizza oven out of service are about as hairy as it gets. Even when the children are snowbound in a cabin on top of a mountain, the mood never goes beyond cheery and cozy.

The four children live with their grandfather, a remarkably laissez-faire caregiver who has no problem dropping them off at the foot of a mountain and promising to come back for them a week later. That sort of freedom is one of the real appeals of a book like this. Another interesting trait, which could come across as goody-goody but somehow doesn’t, is that the kids are full of ideas; in two of the stories that I read, they helped adults do a better job of marketing their business by coming up with innovations like letting customers vote for their favorite pizza. And that’s another part of the fun of this sort of book—the kids are smarter than the grownups. Always.

With a lot of story to tell in each slim volume, the adaptors waste no space. The writing is mostly simple declarative sentences, and the characters fill in backstory and details with dialogue. The art is not brilliant, but it’s good enough to carry the story and not be a distraction. I’ve certainly seen worse.

Nothing about these books screams “quality literature,” but the same could be said of the originals, and of all the other adventure-story books I read as a kid. Still, the plots are solid, the puzzles are interesting, and if all the characters are a bit too nice, well, let that be a counterweight to the sea of snark our children are exposed to in other media. The writing may be pedestrian but the stories do pull you in—they’re page-turners, for sure. These are old-fashioned books, and they don’t pretend otherwise; I think these would be a good choice for young children who just want a good story and don’t mind if there aren’t a lot of bells and whistles.

Filed under: All Ages, Graphic Novels, Reviews

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About Brigid Alverson

Brigid Alverson, the editor of the Good Comics for Kids blog, has been reading comics since she was 4. She has an MFA in printmaking and has worked as a book editor and a newspaper reporter; now she is assistant to the mayor of Melrose, Massachusetts. In addition to editing GC4K, she writes about comics and graphic novels at MangaBlog, SLJTeen, Publishers Weekly Comics World, Comic Book Resources, MTV Geek, and Good E-Reader.com. Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters in college, which is why she writes so much. She was a judge for the 2012 Eisner Awards.

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Comments

  1. Kat Kan says

    September 1, 2013 at 8:52 pm

    I’m glad to have my opinion of these books validated – I think the same way about them! I have some in my school, and I keep them next to the original novels.

  2. miranalini says

    September 11, 2013 at 9:45 am

    I love the graphics and concept of this comics, but this book is lacking some of the major points which are important to attract the readers. It should be more scary and mysterious. The literature of the book could make more interesting.
    collection of stories

  3. Nabila Khashoggi says

    November 7, 2013 at 3:30 pm

    This is a great review, thank you for publishing it. As an author of a graphic novel series for children, I like to share other well-thought of books with my friends and fans. Education combined with a sense of adventure is my key as an author, and I like to stay in good company with that. Thank you!

  4. Benjamin McLean says

    October 25, 2014 at 2:00 am

    The original books were works of technical perfection from an educational perspective. They were designed specifically in order to be a child’s first chapter books. The first book for which the child can say, “I read a real chapter book all by myself!!” They are an excellent bridge to early reading and prepare the child to take on more challenging books very quickly.

    I think it’s a crime against humanity that graphic novels of the Boxcar Children series were allowed to exist.

    I think the same thing about adults reading the original books to children. They absolutely should not, under any circumstances, ever be read to children. The children must read them on their own. There should be no audiobooks and no easy way to get into The Boxcar Children. The Boxcar Children already is the easy way.

    That is the whole point of them. They should not be judged according to ordinary literary standards without taking that technical constraint into account. That would be like complaining that Ian Descher’s “William Shakespeare’s Star Wars” is bad because “it uses archaic language.” The books are brilliant because of how they are flawlessly engineered to teach reading while maintaining interest and the easiest possible learning curve. I have never encountered any other book series which does such an excellent job at what The Boxcar Children sets out to do educationally.

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