I'm pretty sure that when I was a little kid I saw the cartoon version of Charlotte's Web. All that I remember was that the ending had a bunch of baby spiders floating all over the place. This reminded me of one day a couple of months ago when I opened my garage door and pretty much the same thing happened. Let me just add that I don't like spiders. The plot is pretty simple. Wilbur the pig is born the runt of a litter and is only saved from the axe by the farmer's daughter Fern. She helps Wilbur get bigger until he is moved to Fern's uncle's farm. At the farm he befriends a bunch of animals including the spider Charlotte. Wilbur fears that the farmer will eventually turn him into some nice tasty bacon... so Charlotte spins a web with the words "Some Pig" into it. Everyone sees this web and takes it as a miracle and Wilbur becomes famous. After a few more messages the farmer decides to keep Wilbur around and not turn him into Christmas dinner. Then the spider dies and all of her creepy spider eggs hatch and a few of the spiders stick around to be friends with Wilbur. The end.
Overall I enjoyed the book.... but when comparing it to something like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Wind in the Willows, or Anne of Green Gables it isn't quite as good. There were just too many little things that bugged me to really say that it was a truly great book. Let me make a list...
-The girl, Fern, doesn't do much to move the story along once the pig is taken out of her care... actually by the very end she doesn't even care about Wilbur at all and would rather hang out with her friend then see Wilbur get an award. What kind of friend is that?
-At one point Fern tells her parents that the animals can speak to each other and listens to their conversations... yet there isn't a scene where she first discovers this nor does she mention it again... and yet she ignores Wilbur at the very end.
-At first I wanted to know how it is that a spider can spell... but then it is revealed that Charlotte is actually a poor speller, but can still read. This left me with the question... how does a spider know how to read? I usually have a pretty high level of suspension of disbelief when I approach this kind of story, but this just crashed it.
-So at the end Wilbur is famous for.... just being famous. There really isn't anything special about Wilbur at all yet he's so "special". At least the pig in Babe was really good at something and earned its keep.
-At one point Templeton the rat complains that everyone is mean to him and is always making him do favors for them and he's totally right. Without him Wilbur would have been turned into a ham, yet Wilbur only focuses on how Charlotte helped him. I felt bad for the rat... it seemed like all of the other animals were prejudiced against him just because he was a rat.
-I realized that this book has probably made at least a few people vegetarians without really meaning to.
- All Wilbur does is worry the whole book, he doesn't actually do anything at all except sit around and hope he doesn't get eaten. He is not a proactive pig at all.
I'd recommend the book for little kids, but for adults it doesn't offer that much. B+
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