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Title: Mrs Pepperpot's Year

Author: Alf Prøysen

Translator: Marianne Helweg

Illustrator: Bjorn Berg

Publisher: Red Fox

Date Published: 1999

Format: Paperback

Genre:

Book Category: Fiction

Age Range: 9-11

Original Title: First published in Norwegian. First published in English by Hutchinson, 1973

Country of Origin: Norway

Mrs Pepperpot's Year

by Alf Prøysen
Age Range: 9-11

Mrs Pepperpot’s Year Join Mrs Pepperpot on a different adventure for every month of the year! Mrs Pepperpot gets up to all sorts of excitement between New Year and Christmas in Mrs. Pepperpot’s Year, with holidays, Midsummer romances and of course, all the weird and wonderful things that happen when she shrinks!

Alf Prøysen has created a calendar of stories in this collection and they do not disappoint. Each chapter in this book also works as a story on its own, and each is unique and looks at a different, special moment in the year. Mrs Pepperpot’s adventures range from special occasions such as Christmas, Easter and New Year to stories about spring or autumn coming. It is fun to work through the book and try to anticipate what will come next and what Mrs Pepperpot will get up to. A chick-inspired Easter story is perhaps the most intriguing tale and really shows the scale of Prøysen’s imagination!

Prøysen’s books are works of terrific simplicity and are wonderfully creative, using an easy to read vocabulary and short, basic –but imaginative- plots as he finds the unusual and sees the magic in everyday situations and manages to turn it into something different and new. Mrs Pepperpot can talk to animals, enchant household items and sees life from a different perspective when tiny.

Prøysen picks situations that children can easily picture and encourages them to imagine it. The way the chapters work as short stories but still hang together as a narrative is also encouraging for younger readers and slower readers. You can feel you’ve read a story after just one chapter and you can dip in and out of the stories and still have the book make sense, although it is lovely to see the changing of the seasons and the progression of the year if you read the book in order.

The stories lose none of their charm in translation, and Marianne Helweg’s translations are clear, easy to read and bring the funny, gutsy and determined Mrs Pepperpot to life for English readers. Mrs Pepperpot is also brought off the page by Björn Berg’s excellent black and white sketch illustrations. Each one shows Mrs Pepperpot bursting with energy and they’re guaranteed to make you laugh when they depict her shrinking!

Overall, this is a wonderful Mrs. Pepperpot story collection, with exciting adventures, laugh out loud moments and some gentler stories that show Mrs Pepperpot’s generosity when she is full-sized, as well as her gutsiness and inventiveness when she is small. Savour each story and the particular moment of the year they highlight; in particular, the touching January and December stories, which see Mr and Mrs Pepperpot have a very happy Christmas New Year, as the book comes full circle.

Abby Phillips (2016)

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