Product Description

Rip Van Winkle, the village storyteller, has always loved spinning outrageous and unbelievable yarns for his friends. But when Rip leaves the village one day and doesn't return until 20 years later, he has one story to tell that even he can't quite believe in this easy-to-read adaptation of an American classic. Full color.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7295638 in Books
• Published on: 1994-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover

From Publishers Weekly
Howe, working in a style that is just as realistic as Locker's (see above), highlights the comic gifts of Irving's story: his Rip waves jauntily to a scarecrow, sneaks away from the house unaware that a stern Dame Van Winkle looks on and, in one frame, is seen scrambling out the door away from the shrewish, pointing finger of his wife (the rest of her is offstage). Henry Hudson's crew are a wild-eyed, caricatured bunch; Rip, upon awakening, has ivy and brambles clinging to his hat and pants, and his beard sails down past his knees. He returns to his village and is mistaken for a soldier of the American revolution; but soon settles into a serene life with his daughter and is lastly shown carving from wood the figures of the small men from his "night" on the mountain. This is a vivid piece of storytelling, which takes full advantage of the atmospheric Catskill setting. Howe good-spiritedly taps the elements of the tale that make it an American favorite. Ages 4-8.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 5 Irving's complete text, with unsurpassed pictures by N. C. Wyeth, is still in print (Morrow, 1987). Although Howe's abridgement makes the story available to younger readers, it is debatable whether too much of the mystery and historythe sense of the passing of time and of political changehas been sacrificed in the shortening. Irving's plot has been respected, and although little of his style remains, the narrative line is clear and (except for several pages of uninterrupted text near the end) well-paced to the pictures. Howe works in the ``classic'' Brandywine/Rackham vein, but the pictures skip around seasonally, even though Irving specifies an autumn setting. His interests lie in portraiture and period detail, and while the latter may be lost on a young audience, the wonderful faces of the Half Moon crew, featured on the cover, will grab browsers. If there is a profound side to the tale of Rip's 20-year escapist nap (RIP?), it isn't apparent in this humorous retelling or in the luminous paintings. Patricia Dooley, University of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
A companion volume to Moses' edition of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1995), this book retells, in somewhat simplified language, Irving's classic tale of Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep in the Catskills one evening and awoke 20 years later. Oil paintings appear on nearly every page of this large-format book, which includes a double-page spread portraying the hero's awakening. Like his great-grandmother Grandma Moses, the artist paints in a folk art style that may appeal to adults more than to children. Recommended for collections needing illustrated versions of the tale. Carolyn Phelan

Customer Reviews

Rip Van Winkle
This is the original text of Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving. There are 34 of Rackham's paintings used throughout the text. I do not find the reading level suitable for 4 to 8 year olds. Reading level is about 8th grade (14 years old). Example: "The great error in Rip's composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour. It could not be from the want of assiduity or perseverance..." This is not for 4 to 8 year olds. Illustrations enhance this classic in American literature.

Mystical Truth For The Humble, But No One Else
Washington Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle' originally appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819) alongside another evocative piece of Americana, 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' a wondrous story equally set in Irving's beloved Hudson River Valley. Though not as multilayered as its longer and slightly more well known fellow, 'Rip Van Winkle' also has long roots in Old World folklore, which is appropriate, since The Sketch Book was the first book by an American writer to be taken seriously by the European audiences that then set the standard in the West. Like the earlier A Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809), 'Rip Van Winkle' is playfully attributed to Dutch antiquarian "Diedrich Knickerbocker," the most famous and certainly the most charming of several personae Irving adopted as an author.

Written in simple but gorgeously visionary language, 'Rip Van Winkle' is the story of the lazy but warm spirited farmer, who, in an effort to escape the "petticoat despotism" of his "termagant" wife, flees for an afternoon's hunting in the lonely, autumnal Catskill Mountains. Accompanied only by Wolf, his faithful but equally harassed dog, Rip is surprised when he notices an odd figure approaching through the wilderness and calling out his name. The "short, square built old fellow with thick bushy hair and a grizzled beard" is carrying a "stout keg," and gestures to Van Winkle to assist him with his burden.

Taking up the "flagon," Rip hesitantly follows the little man into an isolated ravine, and thus steps unknowingly into fairyland; there he finds himself confronted by a solemn and outlandishly dressed party of dwarfs playing at ninepins. Bewildered, Rip pours out the beverage for the assemblage, but can't resist taking a drink himself. Awaking on the mountainside, Van Winkle, finding Wolf gone and a badly rusted gun at his side, returns to town, where he discovers his home in ruins, his wife dead, his children grown to adulthood, the land of his birth now an independent nation freed from the yoke of the British, and himself a stranger to the villagers, who stare at his tattered clothing and exceptionally long facial hair. After making bewildered inquiries, he comes to accept that twenty years have passed.

As a humble, good hearted, and mild tempered dreamer, Rip is an archetypal fairytale hero, though the only dragon slain is Dame Van Winkle, and she accidentally, by the passage of time itself. Like kindred spirit Ichabod Crane, Rip is not an absolute novice when it comes to the fantastic, for he has enjoyed telling the village children who love him "long stories about ghosts, witches, and Indians."

As in traditional Celtic fairy lore, in which eating or drinking while visiting fairyland is often punished with permanent residency there, Rip had made the honest mistake of partaking of fairy foodstuffs, and thus pays an unintended price for doing so. For Celtic fairy lore also featured multiple variations on the theme of fairy time; one minute of perceived human time might be seven years of fairy time, and a man spending a happy week dancing in fairyland might discover that one hundred years or more has past on earth upon his return. Whether dwarfs, elves, boggarts, or fairies, Irving's little people are first cousins to many of the mythological beings of European mythology. Interestingly, like the literally "solitary" fairies of Ireland and Scotland, who were brusque of manner at best and never seen in groups (as were the far more gregarious "trooping" fairies), the little men Rip holds audience with "maintain the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence," and thus represent "the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed."

But Irving, who deftly places his story in the historical setting of pre-Revolutionary America, also shrewdly offers his audience other interpretations for Van Winkle's strange mountain encounter. Though narrator Diedrich Knickerbocker acknowledges early that the Catskills are "fairy mountains," one character, sage Peter Vanderdonk, explains that it was the dead "Hendrick Hudson" himself, who returns with his crew every twenty years "to keep a guardian eye on the river," whom Rip encountered, while the postscript indeterminably discusses a variety of Indian spirits, including the Manitou, who haunt the region. One fact entirely overlooked by scholars everywhere is that American literature was born in the daimonic, a tradition begun by Irving but enthusiastically continued by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe.

Like most of Irving's work, at present Rip Van Winkle is a grossly underappreciated piece of pure Americana; certainly American literature could have gotten off to a much worst beginning than it did than with its gallant, optimistic, and uncynical founder. For Rip, despite the precariousness of his experience, learns to accept his fate and settles into a comfortable old age as a venerated member of his community. Not that very long ago, there was a time in America when, taking a direct cue from the story itself, some of America's young schoolchildren were fancifully taught that thunder was not the result of lightning, but merely the echo of the elves' occasional game of mountain bowling.

This definitive edition, first published in 1905, features over fifty genuinely "mesmerizing" though somber watercolor illustrations by British master Arthur Rackham, which perfectly suit Irving's text and will captivate both adults and children alike.

Wonderfully Lazy
The character of Rip Van Winkle is like an older version of Peter Pan, overgrown and frumpy. He seeks to enjoy his life and in doing so engages in mostly childish activities. Adulthood bores him, as it should, because he excels at leisure as much as Ben Franklin stands out in industry.

Rip reads well to married people, who seem to be the ideal audience for the story. The detached approach Irving takes in describing the "henpecking wife" and "curtain lectures" is comical to married couples, husbands in particular. It is a great comfort for men in 2005 to learn that the traffic of henpecking was a one-way street then, too. :)

The character of Rip is admirable. How lucky to be free to do nothing and experience no remorse. He is harmless, and a great credit to the community in entertainment value and spontenaity. By enjoying simple things, he understands the best things in life are free, such as the view from the mountain top and pulling a fish out of the stream. He is good for conversation, non-judgmental, agreeable, and rather kind. Strange, but it seems he could be a fine pastor or priest.

The comedy of this story seems to be the escape from his hellish home life. Some have described heaven as a place of rest, away from the burdens of the world. So Rip, on the mountaintop, taking in a beautiful sight, after a day of shooting squirrels, has some delicious liquor, and falls asleep until two tyrants are deposed; his wife and King George.