Why I hate the Little Miss books

The news that film rights in the Mr Men and Little Miss books have been sold to Fox Animation has thrown me back to a much-regretted decision made shortly before the birth of my second daughter in 2013. Full of plans to occupy the big daughter, I stumbled across a box set of all the Little Miss books, and decided it would be perfect. I had vaguely positive memories of the Mr Men books from my own childhood; the illustrations are brilliant; and they all came in a box with a sliding drawer that I thought would keep her busy for hours.

It turns out that my well-intentioned choice of Little Misses over Mr Men was a poor one. Settled on the sofa for the first of many, many, many feeding sessions, I promised that every time I was thus occupied, I’d read a story. We started with Little Miss Lucky. This is a summary: Little Miss Lucky, clad in a blue-checked hat, lives in Horseshoe Cottage. One windy night, she is locked out of her house, blown away and chased by a walking tree. But it’s OK – it was all a dream! Isn’t she lucky? NO! This makes no sense; it is not an example of luck.

How about Little Miss Tidy? She looks quite sweet. She has her hair in bunches and pink high-heeled shoes on. Again, the pictures are just perfect – if there is one thing I love about Roger Hargreaves’s books, it is the illustrations. The stories, though – not so much. This time around, we journey through an interminable recitation of where Little Miss Tidy might have tidied things away, pages and pages of it, until we reach the pay-off joke: the notebook she was given to note down where she’d put everything has been lost! And once she’s looked everywhere, she finds it … on her bedside table!

Here is Little Miss Fun, full of joy and exclamation marks and throwing a party. But everyone falls asleep. “‘Never mind!’ laughed Little Miss Fun. And she carried on pretending to be a clown. Who was she doing it for, now that everybody was asleep? Well, she was doing it for a little bird, who had flown in through the window.” My god. “But there’s someone else she is doing it for, isn’t there? Why, for you of course! Because you aren’t asleep yet … but you will be soon.” Indeed.

I’m being a bit mean … they’re sweet enough, these stories, but they are dire to read aloud. So very, very wordy. So endlessly repetitive. I dislike the many comments to the listener, and the liberal use of exclamation marks.

On the positive side, at least they fit nicely in one hand when breastfeeding. And a certain Hamilton Richardson’s Amazon reviews of the Mr Men books are a joy. Mr Messy? “If Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Trial had been a children’s book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control. Hargreaves may well pay homage to Kafka and Orwell in this work, but he also goes beyond them.”

I suspect I may be a particularly grumpy sort, and you all love them; Charlie Brooker said he did, after all, last summer. But honestly – and it pains me to say it – the Little Misses are much worse than the Mr Men. We’ve been through the lot of them far too many times, and now the box is – well, not hidden, but not as obvious to spot as it might be. The big one, thank goodness, has moved on to Roald Dahl, while the small one is full of the delights of The Snail and the Whale, Smelly Peter: The Great Pea Eater and Mr Underbed.

Thank goodness.