Mean Margaret

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Question: What do a pair of newlywed woodchucks, a squirrel, a testy snake, a skunk, and a couple of bats have in common with a family of pudgy human beings named Hubble?Answer: Their lives are all turned topsy-turvy by a tyrannical three-year-old named Margaret.Question: Will Mean Margaret ever realize that there's more to life than being nasty to everybody?Answer: Read this touching comedy and find out.

FROM THE CRITICS

Children's Literature - Judy Silverman

Mean Margaret is the ninth child of what we might call a dysfunctional family. When Six, Seven, and Eight dump her into a ditch one night, no one in her family seems to care. But the hedgehogs who find her do care, and care for her as well as they can. Tor Seidler captures the caring hedgehogs and their neighbors the squirrel, the snake, the skunk, and the bats and makes them much more human than the humans. Jon Agee's drawings make us love them. Fun reading for ages 7 to 10, younger for bedtime reading, a chapter at a time.

School Library Journal

Gr 3-6--A wildly funny story of a newly wed woodchuck couple who find a willful, wailing human toddler and take her into their home and into their hearts. (Nov.)

Kirkus Reviews

A fastidious woodchuck discovers parenthood to be worse than his wildest imaginings in this benign, if sardonic, animal tale from Seidler (The Wainscott Weasel, 1993, etc.).

When Sally Hubble, a poster child for the "terrible twos," is left in a ditch by three of her older siblings, the maternal instincts of Phoebe—the new wife of a woodchuck named Fred—are aroused despite the difference in species; soon the child, dubbed Margaret after Phoebe's mother, is ensconced in the once-spotless burrow, pulling apart glowworm lamps, smashing heirloom furniture, and greedily consuming all the honey, berries, and goat's milk the harried woodchucks can gather. Margaret grows at a great rate, and soon the family finds itself sharing a nearby cave with a squirrel, a skunk, two bats, and a snake, plus Phoebe's coquettish sister Babette and her three offspring. When at last Margaret makes the mistake of stomping on the skunk's tail, her reeking flight into the forest reunites her with her natural parents. Fred, whose relief at her flight is not entirely unmixed, realizes that his attitudes toward parenting have undergone a profound change when Phoebe shortly thereafter gives birth to little Patience. Chubby and disheveled, Margaret towers over her exhausted, dapper minions in Agee's numerous thick- lined, simply drawn cartoons. Advanced readers may perceive an edge beneath the drollery, but it's all in good fun.