The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Longfoot, the Shoe King's Son

Sometimes I pity the tweeners of the early nineteenth century and The Quaint and Curious Quest of JL is one of the reasons. Was this really the best children’s literature available in 1948? Did someone really read this and think, “This book deserves an award!”? Apparently. I’m not even sure how to describe the book. I wouldn’t call it fantasy, but it is absurd and everything talks (including the wind) so it might be classified as fantasy. The dialogue is unnatural, the story is unbelievable, and the repentance of the bad guy is sudden and unconvincing.

That being said, I used this book as a motivator while working on my semester-long project (that I started two days before it was due) in my problem-solving class and it actually worked! My system was as follows: after each problem I completed in my problem-solving binder (these were fairly in-depth problems requiring several pages to complete), I could read a chapter from Johnny Longfoot. And it totally worked! I found myself wanting to continue reading past one chapter every time, but always exercising great self-control and solving a problem in between each one. I can’t explain this phenomenon (since I thought the book was awful), so I won’t try.

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