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Nov 09, 2011

Jessica rated it:

Many have seen some tv or movie variation of this story and are familiar with the storyline. I had read it in school and even watched the movie Legend of Sleepy Hollow that came out. I liked the movie, but there is always something about a good story that always beats out the movie especially when it comes to a mystery or scary story.

The story is set in 1790 in a place called Tarry Town that is in a glen called Sleepy Hollow. We meet Ichabod Crane who is a schoolmaster and who wants to marry an More...

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Nov 23, 2011

Clint rated it:

Oh the story of the headless horseman, what better story to read while trying to scare kids or enjoy a nice halloween weekend. The classic horror story created by Washington Irving has been twisted and tweak countless amounts of times to creat movies, shows, and even other books. But there is nothing like the original, and it is evident when reading "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". A story which until the end is just about a man, Icabod Crane, who tries to win a young woman's hand in mar More...

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Nov 21, 2011

Bhuvanesh rated it:

Every aspect of the book is complex: intricate plot, sophisticated language, detailed narration. The author has done a good job by making the story short. The detailed narration brings forth a good imagination.

I'm citing a block below which impressed me a lot.

I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand a More...

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Jul 23, 2011

Book Concierge rated it:

A classic ghost story that has been scaring children (and adults) for centuries. In the fertile valleys of the upper Hudson River lies a small port – Tarry Town. The villagers enjoy good health, fertile farms, and telling tales of ghosts, goblins, witches in their midst. Their schoolmaster is one Ichabod Crane, a tall, gangly fellow who also dabbles as the choir master. One of his musical pupils is the lovely Katrina Van Tassel, the only daughter of one of the wealthiest farmers. The schoolmas More...

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Jul 17, 2011

LitAddictedBrit rated it:

When I first bought my eReader, I was offered 100 free eBooks and a couple of links to sites like Project Gutenberg, where you can download the 'classics' for free. This one caught my eye because I remember going to see the film adaptation when I was younger and being petrified. I thought it would be a suitable bite-size read (at only 30-something pages) for the month of Hallowe'en.

As is often the case, this original story published in 1820 bears very little resemblance to the film it More...

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May 25, 2011

Sara rated it:

Sleepy Hollow is a tiny Dutch community tucked away in the New York countryside not long after the Revolution. It is in this classic short story we are first introduced to two character who have thoroughly captured our darkest imagination, Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. This story has been told and retold innumerable times, but in it's original form it is nothing more than a ghost story told to frighten young children. Ichabod Crane is the local school teacher, fascinated in equal part More...

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Apr 04, 2011

Laura rated it:

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Jan 03, 2010

Alexa SOF2014 rated it:

This creative and magical novel tells the story about Ichabod Crane who is a poor school teacher and only works for 10 dollars a day. This tale takes place around the time of the American Revolution near Tarrytown, New York. Ichabod sleeps in a student's house and does very little work around the house. He falls in love with the beautiful Katrina Van Tassel. She is a wealthy daughter of a Dutch farmer. He goes to dinner one night at her mansion. At the dinner party everyone is talking about a he More...

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Aug 05, 2011

Ronald rated it:

Washington Irving certainly had a firm grasp on language, and he flaunts it here. Still, the flowery description and excruciating attention given to the scenery, vegetation, the food on tables, etc. gets old fast. This is already a short book as it is and said flowery descriptions make up the majority of its length; not much actually happens in terms of story. In fact, the entire plot (which is almost nonexistent) could probably be told in 5 or so pages if we didn't stop to smell the roses so More...

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Oct 31, 2010

Pete rated it:

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Oct 28, 2011

Emma rated it:

Sleepy Hollow is a small town in New York, inhabited by Dutch settlers. Ichabod Crane is the superstitious village schoolteacher. Ichabod is trying to win the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl in the village. When Ichabod leaves a party he attended at the Van Tassel estate, he is chased by a mysterious headless horseman on the lonely road leading to his house.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a short story that pretty much everyone is familiar with but not v More...

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Aug 26, 2010

Bruce rated it:

Irving sets a dreamy and mysterious stage for this tale of the early Dutch in the Hudson River valley. His ability to create a mood of somnolence and suspension of time is uncanny and beguiling. Irving, in creating this mood, sets up a skillful contrast between the indolent and seductive past and the hurrying future, a contrast that he intends to explore and exploit in this, as in so many of, his stories. Ichabod Crane is the figure of the intellectual, the impractical man of the past, while More...

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Nov 23, 2011

Ellen rated it:

Written in the style of older literature, THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW is long-winded and at times even boring. There is far too much description with minimal plot. The reader must plough through pages of rambling before even meeting the main character, Icabod Crane. After that there is even more rambling before Icabod’s story really begins.

However, this story isn’t all bad. It bears no resemblance to Tim Burton’s amazing SLEEPY HOLLOW, but it still delivers some major chills. The More...

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Feb 27, 2009

Jeremiah added it

I learned that Ichabod Crane had survived many near death situations from reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I also learned that Ichabod Crane didn't survive at the end of the story because his body was found floating in the river.The Headless Horseman in the story had no head because some people believed, in the story, that his head got carried away by a cannon ball being shot at him.
In this story Ichabod Crane had a few nemesis' or enemies that were trying to kill him, and in one in More...

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Jan 06, 2012

Mimi rated it:

This is such a classic tale...one that I know well even though this is the first time I've actually read it. Growing up on Long Island, NY, I remember visiting Washington Irving's home in Tarry Town as a child and hearing the story of Ichabod Crane at that point. I also vaguely remember watching the 1948 Disney version when I was younger (and I just re-watched on youtube...amazing how much the coquettish Katrina resembles Disney's Cinderella! ;)). However, I am so glad that I finally read Was More...

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Oct 26, 2011

Alyson rated it:

I found a fun edition of this book to read. It was in the children's section and had great illustrations. The story itself is not very long. The Disney movie version follows very close to the story. There is little character development but the descriptions of the hollow were great.

In addition to reading the story we also went as a bookclub to see a locally written musical production of this book. I enjoyed that there was much more character development and the actors had beautiful s More...

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Sep 23, 2009

Michael rated it:

Would give it a slightly higher rating than 3/5 stars but I wouldn't go 4 stars ... I Walked into this story knowing nothing about the original story itself and its place in the history of American literature else I would have appreciated it more. Instead, what I knew of the story was the cartoon I Watched as a kid and Tim Burton's version (one of my favorite movies).

I liked some of the fanciful descriptions, especially of the food, and the crazy arcane words and the setting it descr More...

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Jun 05, 2011

Carissa Anne rated it:

I listened to this on audio book, and it wasn't really the best decision to get me hooked on the new medium of "reading" while driving. The company that preformed the book had some pretty cheesy and overdone voices that bothered me and took away from the story, and from moment to moment they could switch tones and get so quiet, and then suddenly boom, causing me to have to change the volume frequently so I could hear it. Aside from that, though, I was overall rather disappointed with t More...

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Apr 16, 2008

Becky rated it:

I really enjoyed Irving's description in this story. You can almost smell the fruits of the harvest and the party. It is a very entertaining story for people of all ages.

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Jan 21, 2012

David rated it:

I remember seeing Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999) at the cinema and I’d promised myself I would eventually get round to reading the short story. The image of the headless horseman pursuing his prey through woodland at night is not one you can forget in a hurry and I was intrigued to see where it all started and how many heads would roll.

There’s no doubt Burton’s adaptation of this classic story changed many elements. In Irving’s story the main character of Ichabod Crane is a local s More...

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Sep 23, 2010

Ashley rated it:

This was a quick read, so I'm gonna go with a quick review too. For starters, I was surprised at the lack of plot. There are so many pop culture references to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow that I thought there would be parts of the book that I hadn't heard - usually, pop culture recycles the same parts of a story over and over again. So, I was disappointed to discover that I already knew the tale. Despite that, the book was still enjoyable because of the WAY it is told - it's fiction at its be More...

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Aug 27, 2010

Jess rated it:

Gripping! I remember a very literary flavor (flavour/British spelling) to this short book (I read it in 2005 or 2006). I think this is classified as a "children's book" (I think that's what my copy says--mine's an old copy with very nice illustrations--I believe the artist was Arthur Rackham).

I can't help but feel that the story was written to scare/warn children of the time to not get up to mischief and/or wander about by themselves at night. I bet it worked.

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Oct 10, 2009

Connie rated it:

This is a quick book. My copy has only fourty-three pages. I read it once as a story. Now I am reading it for vocabulary words--he uses some interesting and probably antiquated words. I may have to have my daughter look up some of them in her 1800's dictionary. I would like to see if they mean what I think they mean and then read it again. I find Irving's descriptions and alliterations are very visual. I can imagine him applying the birch to unruly students. He does a good job striking e More...

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Oct 27, 2011

Shannon rated it:

My 11 year old daughter and I read this book for a book club. We enjoyed reading it together. Some of the words and phrasing were a little bit over her head, so it was good that we read it together so I could explain it. We really enjoyed it. Of course, we had heard the story before but never had read the actual book. Washington Irving was certainly a gifted storyteller. His descriptions were vivid and drew a complete picture in my mind. The leader of our book club shared Washington Irvin More...

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Jan 02, 2012

Sorcha rated it:

Listened to the free Librivox recording, and the narrator was well suited to the story.

I've always meant to read this and I'm not sure what I was expecting to happen. I thought that perhaps the headless horseman appeared more often, but this was pitched just right. In Sleepy Hollow, not long after the War of Independance, when many lives were lost, ghost stories have been built up around what happened.

Ichibod Crane, the school teacher, has been courting one of the loca More...

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Oct 22, 2010

Jenn rated it:

A classic tale that was pulled quite faithfully into the cartoon version, this is a well known story of fear and legends. It's often hard to review classic stories, but after reading this, I would have liked to have read more about the characters of the village, and their story. It seems like the villagers and their crazy superstitions were barely touched on, and were rich and full enough for their own book. The movie adaptation by Tim Burton is a lovely revision that captures more of that feel More...

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Oct 20, 2011

Taja rated it:

I understand that the story is wonderful. But the book is boring.

I enjoy all versions of this story that I have ever watched. My favorite, of course, being the Tim Burton version starring Johnny Depp, Christopher Walken & Christine Ricci.

But... Alas, the book was told with little interest much like a poor journalistic newspaper reporting of a gruesome killing in an obscure town. It was "fact based" and not told as a juicy spectator story inducing i More...

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Aug 24, 2011

Ashley rated it:

I thought the short story was great there is a reason why this is a classic. i loved this story as a child but never read it, i had only seen the cartoon version so i was very excited to finally read it. I always thought it would be a very dark story because thats what intrests me most about it. the story its self was not dark as i imagined it to be but i think everyone should read it atleast once. its very detailed and kinda hard to follow at first and you really have to pay attention to know w More...

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Sep 19, 2008

Dusty rated it:

What a great Halloween story! Makes me crave deep autumn.

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Jul 25, 2011

Claudette rated it:

I saw the film Sleepy Hollow a couple of weeks ago and I found it very funny and enjoyable (I mean, I like anything by Tim Burton and anything with Johnny Depp in it, so it wasn't such a big surprise) and I decided to read the short story that inspired the movie.

It was a nice and very short read, and even though the director developed and altered the story a bit, I can understand the appeal it posed.

Did I say that I'm totally in love with Joh More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

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