Kickstarter: The Uncle Books

[woodwardiocom]

Anyone out there got an opinion on The Uncle Books by Martin & Blake? Like, presuming I'm obsessed with getting good books for my daughter to read someday, are they good books, or are they classist books that marginalize women, or both?

Comments

[bluegargantua]

It's aces. I really enjoyed the first couple and I even re-read them a few years ago.

Um...it's boy-heavy (well, male animal heavy) and it's a bit classist, but Uncle is kind of a bumbling monarch. Mostly they're imaginative nonsense stories where Uncle explores his vast TARDIS-like realm and the Badfords make some trouble that eventually backfires on them.

I'm already in for a book -- if you're interested, we could go in on a single pledge together. It'll save on the shipping and per-cost book that way.

later
Tom

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review!

Going from the £37 level to the £70 level would only save us £2.50 each. I'll just pledge on my own.

[phil-masters.livejournal.com]

I have extremely fond memories of them from my own childhood, and I picked up an anthology edition of the first couple a year or two back to remind myself. I'm glad to hear that they're available in the States.

They're maybe a little of their time, but not wildly racist or anything. Opinion tends to divide on whether Uncle is some kind of idolised plutocrat, or whether the whole thing is a subversive satire on class and Uncle is a bit of an idiot. I have to admit that any satire maybe passed the young me by, but honestly, the whole series is quite amiably surreal and weird, and probably no more likely to warp young minds than Mary Poppins (and is certainly considerably less propagandist than Narnia). Look, you've got an Elephant in a dressing gown and his monkey sidekick ambling round a loopy urban fantasy world and occasionally fighting assorted sordid bad guys including a giant jelly and a wooden-legged donkey... Illustrated by Quentin Blake, who is an authentic genius. There is a bit of a shortage of female characters, in retrospect, but at worst that's "shiortage of", not "hostility to".

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review!

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

I picked up an anthology edition of the first couple a year or two back to remind myself. I'm glad to hear that they're available in the States.

By the by, if you didn't follow the link, it's a UK-based Kickstarter project to reissue all six books, in one volume, with an intro by Neil Gaiman. It has very comfortably met its goal.

[phil-masters.livejournal.com]

You were right to guess that I hadn't got around to following the link. Yes, that's interesting, thanks.

I'm not too surprised at the names of some of the famous supporters. They're approximately my contemporaries, which means that they'll have been exposed to a lot of the same books in childhood...