Amelia Bedelia
Although I vaguely remember the name Amelia Bedelia from when I was little, and although my other half said Amelia Bedelia was read all the time as a little one, my little one and I found Amelia Bedelia randomly at the library. Peggy Parish started writing the series, and as far as we can tell, wrote around a dozen titles. These are the early titles. Titles written after 1990 are all written by her nephew, Herman Parish.
Overall, Amelia is a funny character. As far as we can tell, the stories follow a similar pattern where she, as well as at least one family member in one of the stories, from time to time take a statement by someone else very literally, causing a funny situation or misunderstanding.
We’ve only read two of the early titles and one of the later ones, so we can’t fully judge one author over the other, but from what we read they are different styles. The earlier titles have a simple writing style, in the style of “see Dick run” while the later are more storytelling, and the authors have different styles for creating personalities in their characters. Though we normally like the stories better, we did enjoy the earlier titles more. The characters are more comical, exaggerated roles and personalities, and we enjoyed the illustrations more, and at least in the stories we read, Amelia has far bigger and funnier literal mishaps in the early titles than in the later.
Amelia Bedelia (1963): This story has lots of great and funny examples of how literal Amelia is.
Amelia Bedelia and the Surprise Shower (1966): This one, with the literal “shower”, was a bit odd to us - though not odd enough to skip.
Amelia Bedelia’s First Apple Pie (2010): It’s fun that at the end of a story about apple pie there is an actual apple pie recipe so the momentum from the story can continue right on into an activity. However, this story did not have the big literal misunderstanding(s) that we were hoping for after reading two of the earlier Amelia Bedelia stories. And Grandpa was just a tad bit mean.
Cautions: Only as noted above in the comments on the specific titles.
