Written by: Dodie Smith
Released: January 1, 1596 by The Viking Press
Summary: When the Dearly's Dalmatians have their first litter of puppies—fifteen in all—everyone is delighted. But their joy is shattered when the pups are kidnapped! Soon the smartest dogs in London are on the case -- and on the trail of the fur-loving Cruella de Vil, who has far more than fifteen puppies in her grasp....
I had picked this book up on a whim quite a while ago from a Value Village – side note; it’s an amazing place to find used books – and it took me quite a long time to come around to pick it up and read it. As a child I loved the Disney movie (the original, not one of the sequels or the live-action version), and I own a VHS copy of it which I haven’t sat down to watch lately, so a few weeks ago I figured that i would give it a chance and see just how similar the movie was to the book.
It wasn’t that I was disappointed; that’s too harsh a word. I think that I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I thought that I would because I’ve grown older and I’m not entertained by that sort of thing anymore. That being said, it was a wonderful book which I would highly recommend to younger children who haven’t been robbed of their naiveté. I did enjoy reading it; being able to revert back to childhood, but the allure was lost which would have been there had I of read it earlier in life.
I enjoyed reading about the perspective of life from a dog, how they looked upon things and each other, and the description of Cruella de Vil had me chuckling a little while I read because I was able to picture her so well.
One thing that I also found about this book was that it was very dated, as it should be since it was written over half a century ago. While I could overlook a lot of it, there were some comments that really made me re-read the sentence just to make sure that I had read it right the first time.
After it all, I have to give this book a 5/10, but only because it didn’t live up to what I fully expected it to be. I’m sure that many other people would disagree with me, and as a classic children’s novel goes, this was definitely higher rating – like a 7 or 8/10. If you want to read a good, classic children’s book, then try this one out but if you’re looking for a read in general, this may not be for you.
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