Review of “Heidi” by Johanna Spyri
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https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20781/pg20781-images.html
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I never had Heidi as a reading assignment as a kid, so I went into this one knowing very little besides expecting to read about mountain-life.
Heidi is a very innocent tale. It’s about a young girl whose parents have died. After taking care of her for a few years, her aunt takes her to the mountains where her grandfather lives, whom everyone calls Alm-Uncle. He hasn’t been very sociable since the deaths of her parents, and everyone pities her for being left with him.
Heidi, however, loves life there. She spends time with the goatherd, Peter, and her grandfather takes good care of her.
Eventually her aunt comes back years later, having found a new place to leave her in Frankfurt. This upsets her grandfather very much, but she takes Heidi anyway and takes her to a home where they’re looking for a companion for a little girl in a wheelchair named Clara. She and Clara get along great, though some of the staff don’t think highly of Heidi.
But Heidi was under the impression she would be going back home the next day. She didn’t realize she would be staying there a long time. Incredibly homesick, she starts to become worn down, until finally she’s taken back because the doctor realizes she’s wasting away there.
This is followed by the doctor and, later, Clara going to visit her in the mountains, and the next conflict is that Peter the goatherd is rather jealous of her new companions. He ends up pushing the wheelchair down the mountain so it’s smashed to pieces, but then he’s torn up by guilt and fear.
However, the fresh mountain air and fresh food have given Clara new strength and happiness, and after much work she’s starting to walk a little bit. It basically ends with everyone getting along, and both Peter and Heidi become inheritors of wealth so that they’ll never need to worry about work.
Someone who enjoys descriptions of mountains and setting suns and flowers and such will probably enjoy this book. The setting is almost as much a character as the characters. It could almost read as an advertisement for visiting the alps.
My favorite description in the book was: “The snow lay so deep around the Alm-hut that the windows seemed to stand level with the ground and the house-door had entirely disappeared.”
Most of the time I’m not a person who is big on description. I usually take in a small amount of description then want to move on with the plot. This would probably be more enjoyable for someone who likes vivid scenery painted on the page.
There’s no one I would qualify as a villain or major antagonist in the book. At worst you’ll have someone who is strict. There’s never any major sense of dread that much of anything bad is going to happen to anyone, because scenes tend to play out as Heidi doing something and being instantly forgiven or helped. Characters she interacts with are sympathetic and will try to do their best for her. Even though we’re introduced to the grandfather as a gruff man that everyone is afraid of, we never see anything from him that shows that people should have that reaction. He immediately takes care of Heidi, and does things like help repair other houses upon request.
Clara’s family is also a bottomless pit of wealth, it seems like, so they can easily cover the costs of all problems and also pay for both Heidi and Peter for the rest of their lives in the end. In that sense, the tale is very innocent. There is nothing sinister happening in it. There’s nothing to be tense about. For an adult, I don’t know if it’s a book I would recommend, because I don’t think there is too much there for adults.
For a child I could see some value. The story does teach a few good lessons.
- To be patient when you don’t get what you want immediately. Heidi wants to go home right away, but instead she stays and ends up learning to read there. Then, when she goes back, she helps teach Peter to read, too.
- That nature and fresh food is healthy. I do think we’re very disconnected from our food sources, and a lot of us probably aren’t living the healthiest lives in the city. Sometimes it’s good to get back to our roots. Get out, get fresh air, water, milk, food…
- A guilty conscience will haunt you. It’s better to come clean.
I’m not a religious person and the text does get excessively preachy. There are good lessons in there, but they are heavy-handed.
It took me longer to finish it because just about all characters immediately do the nicest thing possible. It would be akin to if I told a story about falling off a bicycle, and then the people around me asked if I needed help and offered me a first aid kit. It’s nice, but not too much happened, and it became apparent quickly that the main players were all going to be like that. Everyone is instantly forgiving, everyone will instantly do the best thing for Heidi when they find out something is wrong, everyone will give luxurious gifts.
This story is more for people who want to enjoy a setting and read about a little girl getting into minor mischief with no consequences. You can get a good sense of the lifestyle.
Next time I’ll be reading “Glow Worm” by Harlan Ellison. Here’s a link if you’d like to read along!
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67362/67362-h/67362-h.htm
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