Day Eighteen: The Crows of Pearblossom

Adding to yesterday's children's book find is a book I forgot I had, which I pulled off the shelf as I was cleaning my at-home library (it feels weird to refer to it as a library, but let's be real, I have a LOT of books). This one's originally from 1944 (republished in 1967 under the Weekly Reader line) and is called "The Crows of Pearblossom" - boy, does it ever feel like it was made in the 1940's!

The illustrations are delightful and have that vintage charm I enjoy so much with older children's books! It definitely shows its age, though, as you'll see in a moment. The book is about a pair of married crows whose eggs are frequently stolen from their nest by a hungry snake, and throughout the story, they look for ways in which they can stop the snake in its tracks once and for all. The book itself isn't long, but it's a sign of the time during which it was created; Mrs. Crow, at her wit's end seeing her eggs disappear one after the next, is dressed up in traditional housewife garb (though I will say, there's something incredibly cute about a crow dressed up in an apron or a robe):

Mrs. Crow suggests that Mr. Crow go down to the snake's den and kill it, and it's here (and in other places in the book) that the tone/dynamic is pretty distinct; in two different scenes, Mr. Crow tells Mrs. Crow that her ideas are never good and that she "talks too much and needs to keep her beak shut." Wow! That's, uh...yeah.

Mr. Crow eventually hatches a plan (boooo) alongside wise Owl to paint some rocks to resemble crow eggs, and the snake takes the bait - he eats both rocks and has a terrible stomachache as a result. Meanwhile, as he's out of commission and can't go anywhere, Mrs. Crow scolds him for his awful habits and uses him as a clothesline for her laundry. Eeeuuuhhh?

Well, that's not macabre in any way.

Anyway, this was a weird read. I liked the illustrations a lot, but it was otherwise pretty unremarkable; every now and then I'll keep a book like this for the aesthetic and for a look into what children's books were like decades ago, but I can't imagine something like this flying off the shelves (booooooo) these days.