The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell at Escape Into Life

Just a quick note to say that my latest review is up at Escape Into Life. I finally get around to reading the short children's book The Animal Family this time. I came to Jarrell through his essays rather than his poems and read his novel Pictures From an Institution, one of those academia satires that professors seem to be awfully fond of writing a long time ago. I never read any of his later children's books till now, though. The Animal Family is a children's story in something of the same way that Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child is a children's story, though not as somber. Although I see on Good Reads that many people remember it fondly from childhood, I do wonder exactly what sort of children Jarrell was thinking of when he wrote it.