As a six year old, I so much enjoyed having my maternal grandmother read Erich Kästner's Pünktchen und Anton to me (as a treat while she was visiting, and I do seem to remember that greedy little I actually asked for multiple readings). And even now, upon finally rereading Pünktchen und Anton for the first time in many decades, I still do find the author's sense of humour delightful and have also noticed how incredibly, how very alike and similar to Lucy Maud Montgomery's famous Anne Shirley Kästner's Pünktchen Pogge often is, with her imagination, with her joy and delight in playacting, with her fun and laughter (but also and concurrently, how equally akin Pünktchen is to one of my very favourite Astrid Lindgren characters, how similar Pünktchen is to Lindgren's Madicken, with both characters showing such a sweet and heartening combination of imagination, even if it is at times a bit overdone and unbridled, albeit also infused with a deeply rooted sense of social justice and social responsibility, which in Pünktchen Pogge manifests itself mostly in the fact that even though she is a child of wealth and privilege, her very best friend, Anton Gast, is a poor working class lad with an ill single mother, who must care for her and earn money since she has just had a serious medical procedure and is unable to work).
However and that all having been said, and even though I do indeed very much appreciate especially Pünktchen as a character as much now as I did then, as I did when I was a child, well I do have to admit that the entire premise of Pünktchen und Anton as a story in and of itself (with Pünktchen being taken by her governesses Miss Andacht to beg for money to give to her significant other and Anton finally foiling the latter's attempts to burglarise the Pogges' posh Berlin apartment), while I found this all very humorously entertaining, even rather massively exciting as a child reader (or rather as a child listener), as an older adult (and unlike many if not most of the other Erich Kästner novels of my youth), I do now consider particularly Pünktchen und Anton a trifle unbelievable and exaggerated (although if truth be told, the unbelievable and exaggerated scenario of the Pogges' apartment almost being burglarised by the governess's never-do-well boyfriend and the governess, Miss Andacht, even taking Pünktchen out at night to go begging for money and all this unbeknownst to her family, this certainly stridently demonstrates and reiterates just how clueless and lacking in basic common sense especially Pünktchen's mother is, how she certainly spends more time shopping, playing the "große Dame" than taking care of her young daughter and even remotely adequately managing her household).
Four stars and most definitely highly recommended is Pünktchen and Anton (but with the necessary caveat that I have not read ANY of the English language translations to date and thus cannot and will not make any comments on them), but indeed, I am now rounding this novel down to a high three star ranking, as I just cannot (as someone who regularly suffers from both tension headaches and occasional week long migraines) accept Erich Kästner claiming that migraines are not real and bona fide headaches, that migraines are simply psychosomatic excuses used by wealthy upper class women to hide away and not face up to their responsibilities (and while with Pünktchen's mother, this might indeed be the case, I do have a few issues with how generalising with regard to women in general Erich Kästner seems to often be in Pünktchen und Anton, as I also tend to find that aside from Anton's mother and of course Pünktchen herself, many of the female characters who inhabit the pages of this novel seem to have the tendency to appear as rather stereotypically depicted as negative, as whining, as not particularly praiseworthy and positive, and even with Bertha the cook, there is somewhat of an authorial sense of smiling at her with gentle but firm paternalism present, even whilst Erich Kästner is describing her positively as flattening the potential burglar with a conk on the noggin).