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Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection #2
Doctor Dolittle The Complete Collection, Vol. 2: Doctor Dolittle's Circus; Doctor Dolittle's Caravan; Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary
Just in time for the major motion picture Dolittle starring Robert Downey Jr.—soaring into theaters on January 17, 2020!
Journey into the world of Doctor Dolittle, the kind and eccentric naturalist who can speak with animals. Working with original author Hugh Lofting’s son, these books have been fully updated for the modern reader, all while retaining the full charm of the originals.
Rediscover the children’s literature classic with three novels from the beloved series!
Back from Africa, the Doctor is short of money as always. So he takes the pushmi-pullyu on tour in Doctor Dolittle’s Circus ! But in Albert Blossom’s circus, what he finds is a whole new family of animals in need of his help. In Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan he expands his circus to include the grand “Canary Opera,” and makes a sensation of its star, Pippinella, whose story is told in full in Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary ! And in Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary , Pippinella tells her story to Doctor Dolittle in her own words!
Journey into the world of Doctor Dolittle, the kind and eccentric naturalist who can speak with animals. Working with original author Hugh Lofting’s son, these books have been fully updated for the modern reader, all while retaining the full charm of the originals.
Rediscover the children’s literature classic with three novels from the beloved series!
Back from Africa, the Doctor is short of money as always. So he takes the pushmi-pullyu on tour in Doctor Dolittle’s Circus ! But in Albert Blossom’s circus, what he finds is a whole new family of animals in need of his help. In Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan he expands his circus to include the grand “Canary Opera,” and makes a sensation of its star, Pippinella, whose story is told in full in Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary ! And in Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary , Pippinella tells her story to Doctor Dolittle in her own words!
880 pages, Hardcover
Published November 12, 2019
30 people are currently reading
100 people want to read
About the author
Hugh Lofting
386 books185 followersHugh Lofting was a British author, trained as a civil engineer, who created the character of Doctor Dolittle — one of the classics of children's literature.
Lofting was born in Maidenhead, England, to English and Irish parents. His early education was at Mount St Mary's College in Sheffield, after which he went to the United States, completing a degree in civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He traveled widely as a civil engineer before enlisting in the Irish Guards to serve in World War I. Not wishing to write to his children of the brutality of the war, he wrote imaginative letters that were the foundation of the successful Doctor Dolittle novels for children. Seriously wounded in the war, he moved with his family to Connecticut in the United States. Lofting was married three times and had three children, one of whom, his son Christopher, is the executor of his literary estate.
"For years it was a constant source of shock to me to find my writings amongst 'juveniles,'" Lofting reported. "It does not bother me any more now, but I still feel there should be a category of 'seniles' to offset the epithet."
Doctor Dolittle
Hugh Lofting's doctor from Puddleby-on-the-Marsh who could speak to animals first saw light in the author's illustrated letters to children, written from the trenches during World War I when actual news, he later said, was either too horrible or too dull. The stories are set in early Victorian England, (in and around the 1840s, according to a date given in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle). The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts Never Before Printed (1920) began the series and won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958.The sequel, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922), won Lofting the prestigious Newbery Medal. Eight more books followed, and after Lofting's death two more volumes, composed of short unpublished pieces, appeared. The series has been adapted for film and television many times, for stage twice, and for radio.
Other Works for Children
The Story of Mrs Tubbs (1923) and Tommy, Tilly, and Mrs. Tubbs (1936) are picture books aimed at a younger audience than the Doctor Dolittle books. They concern the titular old woman, her pets (with whom she can speak) and the animals who help her out of trouble.
Porridge Poetry (1924) is the only non-Dolittle work by Lofting still in print. It is a lighthearted, colorfully illustrated book of poems for children.
Noisy Nora (1929) is a cautionary tale about a girl who is a noisy eater. The book is printed as if hand-written, and the many illustrations often merge with the text.
The Twilight of Magic (1930) is aimed at older readers. It is set in an age when magic is dying and science is beginning. This work is the only one of Lofting's books to be illustrated by another person (Lois Lenski).
Victory for the Slain
Victory for the Slain (1942) is Lofting's only work for adults, a single long poem in seven parts about the futility of war; the refrain "In war the only victors are the slain" permeates the poem. It was published only in the United Kingdom.
Lofting was born in Maidenhead, England, to English and Irish parents. His early education was at Mount St Mary's College in Sheffield, after which he went to the United States, completing a degree in civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He traveled widely as a civil engineer before enlisting in the Irish Guards to serve in World War I. Not wishing to write to his children of the brutality of the war, he wrote imaginative letters that were the foundation of the successful Doctor Dolittle novels for children. Seriously wounded in the war, he moved with his family to Connecticut in the United States. Lofting was married three times and had three children, one of whom, his son Christopher, is the executor of his literary estate.
"For years it was a constant source of shock to me to find my writings amongst 'juveniles,'" Lofting reported. "It does not bother me any more now, but I still feel there should be a category of 'seniles' to offset the epithet."
Doctor Dolittle
Hugh Lofting's doctor from Puddleby-on-the-Marsh who could speak to animals first saw light in the author's illustrated letters to children, written from the trenches during World War I when actual news, he later said, was either too horrible or too dull. The stories are set in early Victorian England, (in and around the 1840s, according to a date given in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle). The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts Never Before Printed (1920) began the series and won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958.The sequel, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922), won Lofting the prestigious Newbery Medal. Eight more books followed, and after Lofting's death two more volumes, composed of short unpublished pieces, appeared. The series has been adapted for film and television many times, for stage twice, and for radio.
Other Works for Children
The Story of Mrs Tubbs (1923) and Tommy, Tilly, and Mrs. Tubbs (1936) are picture books aimed at a younger audience than the Doctor Dolittle books. They concern the titular old woman, her pets (with whom she can speak) and the animals who help her out of trouble.
Porridge Poetry (1924) is the only non-Dolittle work by Lofting still in print. It is a lighthearted, colorfully illustrated book of poems for children.
Noisy Nora (1929) is a cautionary tale about a girl who is a noisy eater. The book is printed as if hand-written, and the many illustrations often merge with the text.
The Twilight of Magic (1930) is aimed at older readers. It is set in an age when magic is dying and science is beginning. This work is the only one of Lofting's books to be illustrated by another person (Lois Lenski).
Victory for the Slain
Victory for the Slain (1942) is Lofting's only work for adults, a single long poem in seven parts about the futility of war; the refrain "In war the only victors are the slain" permeates the poem. It was published only in the United Kingdom.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 17, 2021
An initial minor complaint about this very nicely packaged collection: reading a solid 900 pages in one go is pretty tiring, even when it is a set of children's stories, particularly when you're making mental notes along the way and trying to remember everything you want to say when you finally finish reading all three books. And for children's books, these are honestly pretty hefty stories.
If you're going to combine things, though, the three packaged together here make a lot of sense. While Circus was published in 1924 and only interrupted by one other book before continuing its chronology in 1926's Caravan, The Green Canary didn't arrive until 1950 - the second to last of the Dolittle adventures to make it to print.
I don't usually like reading books out of their published order, but there's such a clear narrative thread in these three that it's hard to imagine jostling them into another arrangement - even though Lofting himself can be rather terrible at keeping his own internal chronology straight.
Doctor Dolittle's Post Office, while published earlier - in 1923 - is specifically introduced as a story that takes place after Dolittle's time in the circus. That book begins with a description of how "the Pushmi-Pullyu, after a long stay in England, had grown a little homesick for Africa." It also fits with The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920) closing off with a quick summary of the Pushmi-Pullyu arriving in England and being taken on a whirlwind money-making circus tour in a caravan.
So imagine my surprise when a few pages into Doctor Dolittle's Circus, I started marking mention after mention of the African Post Office, with Lofting having either forgotten or chosen to ignore that these events hadn't happened yet.
That becomes a bit of an issue with Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary as well, although it's pretty likely that after a gap of more than two decades, he got to parts of that expanded story and decided it would be more interesting to change some of the details he'd already established in Doctor Dolittle's Caravan.
This is all a long-winded way to say that you can't expect these books to fit perfectly together, so if you're as much of a stickler for details as I am, it'll be a bit tough to read through all of them in a row.
Issues with chronology and internal logic grow more apparent once you've packaged them in such a cohesively pretty collection; when I was a kid, pulling whatever books I could find off library or used bookstore shelves, I didn't notice the narrative gaps because I was usually reading them out of order, months or years apart, or missing certain books entirely. (For instance, it's been long enough since I've read all of these that I can't be sure, but I don't think I've ever read The Green Canary before...and I remember crucial parts of the other two books in this volume fairly well.)
Setting aside those irritating but ignorable narrative blips, I was deeply relieved to find that this is the Dolittle world that I had remembered with such affection. Now that I've read these three books, I can admit that I...kind of didn't like most of Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1. As I'd hoped, once Lofting stuck to his native shores, a lot of the issues I'd had with his writing fell away, and he was free to be funny, wildly inventive, and occasionally quite profound. Rather than the Doctor traveling to other countries and essentially colonizing them, he spends most of his time fighting for animals' rights - something there's a lot of opportunity for when you're a part of a rundown circus in England in the early 1900s.
Here's the Lofting who inspired me when I was a kid. He makes John Dolittle and his animal family feel real, and every time the Doctor argued for things like better living conditions for the circus menagerie, the abolition of fox hunting, and general kind treatment for the creatures around us, I found myself nodding along. Not everything the Doctor proposes is entirely logical or remotely possible - the animal bank was pretty absurd and only lasted about a week, even in fiction - but a lot of the messages of these books left a deep impression on me when I was a kid, and I'm still drawn to them as an adult.
Plus, I was surprised by how beautiful some of the writing was. There are some absolutely gorgeous descriptions mixed in here, and the language is really never dumbed down for kids. As I read, I kept thinking that there's a real Dickensian feel to these stories; like I said before, they're hefty, quite detailed, and full of quirky characters and one intriguingly complicated scenario piled on top of another. I guess it's not too surprising that Dickens was one of the first "adult" writers I started reading when I was young; I'd already been introduced to that sort of vibrantly complex world through children's fiction.
I marked a lot of pages as I was reading, but I'll try to keep to quicker summaries of each book - mostly to jog my own memory later on, since it'll probably be a while before I read any of these again. At this point, though, I'm thinking I will keep them. If the rest of the books are more like Volume 2 than Volume 1, they'll certainly be worth the nostalgia.
Doctor Dolittle's Circus
At 315 pages, this is the longest of the three books, with the most narrative sprawl. A solid half of it hardly even takes place in the circus; shortly after joining, the Doctor discovers that he, of course, hates how nearly everything is run and only stays with the detestable institution because the animals (and Matthew Mugg, the Cat's-Meat-Man) convince him that he can eventually make a concrete difference in their lives if he sticks it out.
"Be patient," they say. "You can't change everything in a minute."
It's such a strong, important message for both the Doctor and Lofting's readers to internalize. Even if things seem hopeless, you've got to stick it out. Change doesn't happen overnight, but it will never happen if you don't stay and work for it.
Patience isn't exactly the Doctor's strong suit, though, and it doesn't take long for him to decide to help at least one of the animals - by smuggling a trained seal, Sophie, out of her tank and to the coast, where she'll be able to swim her way back to her Alaskan herd.
I don't know why, but I've always had a particular love for "road trip"-style stories. That may help to explain my fondness for this book, since Parts 2 & 3 (out of five) are all about the Doctor and Sophie making their way to the coast, by stagecoach and hedgerow and horse-drawn wagon in a series of hilarious misadventures. There's something deeply funny about the Doctor dressing a seal up in a long coat and a bonnet and attempting to pass her off as an ailing woman - and then getting arrested when he throws her, coat and bonnet and all, off a cliff into the sea. Understandably, the coast guard watching this from afar assume that he's just murdered his wife, or some other unfortunate woman, and drag him off to jail to pay for his crimes.
Fortunately, coincidences and chance meetings always pop up to save the day in these stories, and it turns out the judge in this coastal town is someone Dolittle went to school with, back in the day. Although they disagree fervently on topics like fox hunting, the judge knows Dolittle is neither married nor a murderer, and contrives to free him. The Doctor, in return, manages to (kind of accidentally) wipe out fox hunting in the region, thus repaying his friend in a manner that really shouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows him. (Incidentally, one of these fox-hunting chapters was removed from my 1988 edition; since there's nothing objectionable in it, I suppose the editors just felt it was dragging out a side story for too long, and chose to snip it short and return the Doctor to the circus, posthaste. I'm glad it's been restored here.)
I really like the Doctor as he's portrayed in these stories; he's brilliant and earnest and warm-hearted, but also a pretty gigantic disaster. I'm not surprised his sister abandoned him shortly after her first appearance, or that she nearly faints in humiliated despair every time she runs onto him from then on (which is another hilarious running joke throughout these books).
As an adult, I find myself identifying more and more with poor Dab-Dab, the housekeeper duck, who simply cannot keep the Doctor from immediately spending every penny he puts in his pockets. He is a good man, but there's a weird sort of selfishness to him, too, that would make it difficult for him to last for long in regular human society...which is probably why he spends all his time with animals. His only real human friend, at this point, is Matthew Mugg, who doesn't speak any animal languages but seems to understand them in his own way - and who's shrewd enough to use the Doctor's talents to create a life that he's always dreamed of. Becoming a circus ringmaster, and then the Doctor's manager, is a big promotion from rural Cat's-Meat-Man, and Matthew does his best to keep the money flowing in faster than the Doctor can send it back out.
And that is a really difficult task.
At one point, when the Doctor is still traveling with Sophie and running low on money to feed them, he stops in a town "to buy some sandwiches and fruit at a hotel." Reasonable enough, right? But it's what comes next that's interesting, and tells you a lot about the Doctor.
Dab-Dab wasn't around to scream at him, so I did her work for her. Why is he like this?? And throughout more than 300 pages...in fact, through the nearly 900 pages of this entire book...he's vaguely determined to make money to pay back the sailor whose boat he wrecked (the entire reason he joined the circus to begin with), but it's clear he doesn't really give a fig about that guy, or about repaying the debt in a timely manner. Time after time, he makes some money, then spends it on something totally irresponsible - or refuses to follow Dab-Dab's advice about Mr. Blossom, and predictably gets completely ripped off and loses his entire income from the circus's animal pantomime.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks, and you can't make the Doctor understand that money is something he actually needs. Honestly, as interesting and good-hearted as he is, if I were Dab-Dab, I would've left him a long time ago. So I guess I relate a little bit to Sarah Dolittle?
When the Doctor returns from his travels with Sophie, we finally get back to the main circus narrative, and to the little animal family who'd been missing from the storyline for more than a hundred pages. True to their predictions, he ends up taking over the circus...mostly just because they all get ripped off by Blossom, and there's no one else to do the job. But as bad as the Doctor is with that meddlesome thing called money, he's pretty great at rolling with unexpected punches, and the story wraps up with some descriptions of how he transformed a dirty, abusive circus into exactly the kind of clean, welcoming, animal-led institution he'd always felt it should be. And, because this is fantasy and the good people always ultimately win, it's a bigger financial success because of all the positive changes he's made.
When the Doctor gets his way and animals are treated fairly and with kindness, it turns out we're all better for it. Not a bad message to close out on.
Note:
And now, despite my attempt to keep this "quick," I've run into what is apparently a character limit on Goodreads - I was not previously aware that was a thing! So I suppose that shows you how inspiring the Dolittle books can be.
You can read the rest - still on Goodreads - by clicking here.
If you're going to combine things, though, the three packaged together here make a lot of sense. While Circus was published in 1924 and only interrupted by one other book before continuing its chronology in 1926's Caravan, The Green Canary didn't arrive until 1950 - the second to last of the Dolittle adventures to make it to print.
I don't usually like reading books out of their published order, but there's such a clear narrative thread in these three that it's hard to imagine jostling them into another arrangement - even though Lofting himself can be rather terrible at keeping his own internal chronology straight.
Doctor Dolittle's Post Office, while published earlier - in 1923 - is specifically introduced as a story that takes place after Dolittle's time in the circus. That book begins with a description of how "the Pushmi-Pullyu, after a long stay in England, had grown a little homesick for Africa." It also fits with The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920) closing off with a quick summary of the Pushmi-Pullyu arriving in England and being taken on a whirlwind money-making circus tour in a caravan.
So imagine my surprise when a few pages into Doctor Dolittle's Circus, I started marking mention after mention of the African Post Office, with Lofting having either forgotten or chosen to ignore that these events hadn't happened yet.
That becomes a bit of an issue with Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary as well, although it's pretty likely that after a gap of more than two decades, he got to parts of that expanded story and decided it would be more interesting to change some of the details he'd already established in Doctor Dolittle's Caravan.
This is all a long-winded way to say that you can't expect these books to fit perfectly together, so if you're as much of a stickler for details as I am, it'll be a bit tough to read through all of them in a row.
Issues with chronology and internal logic grow more apparent once you've packaged them in such a cohesively pretty collection; when I was a kid, pulling whatever books I could find off library or used bookstore shelves, I didn't notice the narrative gaps because I was usually reading them out of order, months or years apart, or missing certain books entirely. (For instance, it's been long enough since I've read all of these that I can't be sure, but I don't think I've ever read The Green Canary before...and I remember crucial parts of the other two books in this volume fairly well.)
Setting aside those irritating but ignorable narrative blips, I was deeply relieved to find that this is the Dolittle world that I had remembered with such affection. Now that I've read these three books, I can admit that I...kind of didn't like most of Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1. As I'd hoped, once Lofting stuck to his native shores, a lot of the issues I'd had with his writing fell away, and he was free to be funny, wildly inventive, and occasionally quite profound. Rather than the Doctor traveling to other countries and essentially colonizing them, he spends most of his time fighting for animals' rights - something there's a lot of opportunity for when you're a part of a rundown circus in England in the early 1900s.
Here's the Lofting who inspired me when I was a kid. He makes John Dolittle and his animal family feel real, and every time the Doctor argued for things like better living conditions for the circus menagerie, the abolition of fox hunting, and general kind treatment for the creatures around us, I found myself nodding along. Not everything the Doctor proposes is entirely logical or remotely possible - the animal bank was pretty absurd and only lasted about a week, even in fiction - but a lot of the messages of these books left a deep impression on me when I was a kid, and I'm still drawn to them as an adult.
Plus, I was surprised by how beautiful some of the writing was. There are some absolutely gorgeous descriptions mixed in here, and the language is really never dumbed down for kids. As I read, I kept thinking that there's a real Dickensian feel to these stories; like I said before, they're hefty, quite detailed, and full of quirky characters and one intriguingly complicated scenario piled on top of another. I guess it's not too surprising that Dickens was one of the first "adult" writers I started reading when I was young; I'd already been introduced to that sort of vibrantly complex world through children's fiction.
I marked a lot of pages as I was reading, but I'll try to keep to quicker summaries of each book - mostly to jog my own memory later on, since it'll probably be a while before I read any of these again. At this point, though, I'm thinking I will keep them. If the rest of the books are more like Volume 2 than Volume 1, they'll certainly be worth the nostalgia.
Doctor Dolittle's Circus
At 315 pages, this is the longest of the three books, with the most narrative sprawl. A solid half of it hardly even takes place in the circus; shortly after joining, the Doctor discovers that he, of course, hates how nearly everything is run and only stays with the detestable institution because the animals (and Matthew Mugg, the Cat's-Meat-Man) convince him that he can eventually make a concrete difference in their lives if he sticks it out.
"Be patient," they say. "You can't change everything in a minute."
It's such a strong, important message for both the Doctor and Lofting's readers to internalize. Even if things seem hopeless, you've got to stick it out. Change doesn't happen overnight, but it will never happen if you don't stay and work for it.
Patience isn't exactly the Doctor's strong suit, though, and it doesn't take long for him to decide to help at least one of the animals - by smuggling a trained seal, Sophie, out of her tank and to the coast, where she'll be able to swim her way back to her Alaskan herd.
I don't know why, but I've always had a particular love for "road trip"-style stories. That may help to explain my fondness for this book, since Parts 2 & 3 (out of five) are all about the Doctor and Sophie making their way to the coast, by stagecoach and hedgerow and horse-drawn wagon in a series of hilarious misadventures. There's something deeply funny about the Doctor dressing a seal up in a long coat and a bonnet and attempting to pass her off as an ailing woman - and then getting arrested when he throws her, coat and bonnet and all, off a cliff into the sea. Understandably, the coast guard watching this from afar assume that he's just murdered his wife, or some other unfortunate woman, and drag him off to jail to pay for his crimes.
Fortunately, coincidences and chance meetings always pop up to save the day in these stories, and it turns out the judge in this coastal town is someone Dolittle went to school with, back in the day. Although they disagree fervently on topics like fox hunting, the judge knows Dolittle is neither married nor a murderer, and contrives to free him. The Doctor, in return, manages to (kind of accidentally) wipe out fox hunting in the region, thus repaying his friend in a manner that really shouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows him. (Incidentally, one of these fox-hunting chapters was removed from my 1988 edition; since there's nothing objectionable in it, I suppose the editors just felt it was dragging out a side story for too long, and chose to snip it short and return the Doctor to the circus, posthaste. I'm glad it's been restored here.)
I really like the Doctor as he's portrayed in these stories; he's brilliant and earnest and warm-hearted, but also a pretty gigantic disaster. I'm not surprised his sister abandoned him shortly after her first appearance, or that she nearly faints in humiliated despair every time she runs onto him from then on (which is another hilarious running joke throughout these books).
As an adult, I find myself identifying more and more with poor Dab-Dab, the housekeeper duck, who simply cannot keep the Doctor from immediately spending every penny he puts in his pockets. He is a good man, but there's a weird sort of selfishness to him, too, that would make it difficult for him to last for long in regular human society...which is probably why he spends all his time with animals. His only real human friend, at this point, is Matthew Mugg, who doesn't speak any animal languages but seems to understand them in his own way - and who's shrewd enough to use the Doctor's talents to create a life that he's always dreamed of. Becoming a circus ringmaster, and then the Doctor's manager, is a big promotion from rural Cat's-Meat-Man, and Matthew does his best to keep the money flowing in faster than the Doctor can send it back out.
And that is a really difficult task.
At one point, when the Doctor is still traveling with Sophie and running low on money to feed them, he stops in a town "to buy some sandwiches and fruit at a hotel." Reasonable enough, right? But it's what comes next that's interesting, and tells you a lot about the Doctor.
In making these purchases he noticed that his supply of money was getting very low. Indeed, he had only just enough to pay for what he had bought. However, never having bothered much about money, this did not disturb him. And after spending his last twopence to get his boots cleaned - they were frightfully muddy from all this boggy walking - he proceeded to explore a way for Sophie to come around the town by land.
Dab-Dab wasn't around to scream at him, so I did her work for her. Why is he like this?? And throughout more than 300 pages...in fact, through the nearly 900 pages of this entire book...he's vaguely determined to make money to pay back the sailor whose boat he wrecked (the entire reason he joined the circus to begin with), but it's clear he doesn't really give a fig about that guy, or about repaying the debt in a timely manner. Time after time, he makes some money, then spends it on something totally irresponsible - or refuses to follow Dab-Dab's advice about Mr. Blossom, and predictably gets completely ripped off and loses his entire income from the circus's animal pantomime.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks, and you can't make the Doctor understand that money is something he actually needs. Honestly, as interesting and good-hearted as he is, if I were Dab-Dab, I would've left him a long time ago. So I guess I relate a little bit to Sarah Dolittle?
When the Doctor returns from his travels with Sophie, we finally get back to the main circus narrative, and to the little animal family who'd been missing from the storyline for more than a hundred pages. True to their predictions, he ends up taking over the circus...mostly just because they all get ripped off by Blossom, and there's no one else to do the job. But as bad as the Doctor is with that meddlesome thing called money, he's pretty great at rolling with unexpected punches, and the story wraps up with some descriptions of how he transformed a dirty, abusive circus into exactly the kind of clean, welcoming, animal-led institution he'd always felt it should be. And, because this is fantasy and the good people always ultimately win, it's a bigger financial success because of all the positive changes he's made.
When the Doctor gets his way and animals are treated fairly and with kindness, it turns out we're all better for it. Not a bad message to close out on.
Note:
And now, despite my attempt to keep this "quick," I've run into what is apparently a character limit on Goodreads - I was not previously aware that was a thing! So I suppose that shows you how inspiring the Dolittle books can be.
You can read the rest - still on Goodreads - by clicking here.
July 10, 2023
Yendo por parte, de los tres libros que componen este tomo, he de decir que los dos primeros me han gustado muchísimo, el tercero, sin embargo, me ha aburrido muchísimo.
O sea, yo estoy aquí para ver animalitos adorables hacer cosas de animalitos adorables y para reírme con lo surrealista que es John Dolittle, no para que un pajarraco me narre su vida.
Pese a todo eso, hasta el tercer libro se pone interesante, a las veinte páginas de acabar, sí, pero se pone interesante.
Lo mejor de todo el tomo es Dandelion, es que cómo me vas a meter a un zorrito (literalmente un zorro bebé) con pie plano y vas a pretender que no me enamore irremediablemente de él.
En fin, leeros solamente "Doctor Dolittle's Circus", necesitáis a Dandelion pero no lo sabéis todavía.
Pd: pese a que me ha gustado muchísimo, he de decir que sí que hecho de menos el humor "racista", sobre todo cuando los insultos y las bromas van dirigidas a lugares como España. Es que me flipó eso del primer libro.
O sea, yo estoy aquí para ver animalitos adorables hacer cosas de animalitos adorables y para reírme con lo surrealista que es John Dolittle, no para que un pajarraco me narre su vida.
Pese a todo eso, hasta el tercer libro se pone interesante, a las veinte páginas de acabar, sí, pero se pone interesante.
Lo mejor de todo el tomo es Dandelion, es que cómo me vas a meter a un zorrito (literalmente un zorro bebé) con pie plano y vas a pretender que no me enamore irremediablemente de él.
En fin, leeros solamente "Doctor Dolittle's Circus", necesitáis a Dandelion pero no lo sabéis todavía.
Pd: pese a que me ha gustado muchísimo, he de decir que sí que hecho de menos el humor "racista", sobre todo cuando los insultos y las bromas van dirigidas a lugares como España. Es que me flipó eso del primer libro.
June 9, 2021
I learned two things about Hugh Lofton I didn't know through this book: 1) he has a really wacky imagination. He has the Doctor escort a seal by carriage to get it to the sea. He disguises the seal as a lady in a dress, bonnet, and veil. 2) He has a great sense of humor. The two ride with two detectives, who misidentify them as notorious robbers. They give them the slip.
The Doctor perpetually has money problems because he's always giving it away and he doesn't care about earning it. Fortunately his animals look after him and help him out.
Very enjoyable for kids of all ages.
The Doctor perpetually has money problems because he's always giving it away and he doesn't care about earning it. Fortunately his animals look after him and help him out.
Very enjoyable for kids of all ages.
January 15, 2020
Doctor Doolittle's Circus: The doctor and his animal family become part of a circus to make some money. Of course there are lots of adventures and happenings on the way. The same great storytelling and simplistic way of writing that make these books fun to read.
Doctor Doolittle's Caravan: Doctor Doolittle inherits a circus and helps his animals put on an opera. I enjoyed reading all the various things that the animals got up to in this book. I did enjoy the introduction of a couple more animal characters in addition to the normal family members. There was a chapter in the middle of this book where the tense of the writing switched from past tense to present tense and back again. I found it very distracting and it would have been nice to see that corrected with these updated versions of the book.
The Green Canary: I didn't enjoy this particular book as much as the previous ones. There was too much retelling of the previous book and I felt that it made the book drag on and felt repetitive. We learned about Pipinella's story in Doctor Doolittle's Caravan and this book goes over it again with a little more detail. While I appreciate Pipinella's story, I didn't like rereading the same story again. This book also had a lot of errors in it that I would have expected to be caught when they edited and republished the stories.
Overall, not as good as Voyages, still enjoyable stories in an enjoyable world. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Doctor Doolittle's Caravan: Doctor Doolittle inherits a circus and helps his animals put on an opera. I enjoyed reading all the various things that the animals got up to in this book. I did enjoy the introduction of a couple more animal characters in addition to the normal family members. There was a chapter in the middle of this book where the tense of the writing switched from past tense to present tense and back again. I found it very distracting and it would have been nice to see that corrected with these updated versions of the book.
The Green Canary: I didn't enjoy this particular book as much as the previous ones. There was too much retelling of the previous book and I felt that it made the book drag on and felt repetitive. We learned about Pipinella's story in Doctor Doolittle's Caravan and this book goes over it again with a little more detail. While I appreciate Pipinella's story, I didn't like rereading the same story again. This book also had a lot of errors in it that I would have expected to be caught when they edited and republished the stories.
Overall, not as good as Voyages, still enjoyable stories in an enjoyable world. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
October 21, 2020
Best one is the Green Canary. Other two are a bit slow.
June 17, 2021
Very good 👍 😁
I absolutely loved book 2! I couldn't stop reading until I was finished! Can't wait to see what is next!
I absolutely loved book 2! I couldn't stop reading until I was finished! Can't wait to see what is next!
March 28, 2022
Another great book by Hugh Lofting! Though the pushmepullyu was... Confusing
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 18, 2023
After 3 months finally finished it 🤪🤪
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