The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle

This really is a charming, wonderful book. As good as the first book in the series (The Story of Doctor Dolittle) is, Voyages is even better. Voyages is much longer, and the Doctor and his friends get into a whole series of adventures, all told this time from the perspective of a young boy who is a participant. Yes, this is a long book, and some kids would probably find that a bit daunting. What I did was to read a chapter of it every night to my 5 year old. He was enchanted and very much looked forward to it every night. When we got to the end, he wanted to immediately move on to the next book (Doctor Dolittle's Post Office), which we have. The thing I truly enjoy about these Doctor Dolittle books is that the language challenges the children as does (for non-UK readers, anyhow) the Britishisms. I don't want books that have had the "languaged updated" or been "revised for American audiences". No, I want it just the way it was written by the very English Hugh Lofting in the 1920s. Read things like this to your kids (or let them read them themselves) and they'll learn a whole lot more than with the dumbed-down Disneyfied garbage peddled today, most of which is just a markketing vehicle for toys. If you are reading it to kids be prepared that there is the occasional unnecessary depiction of racial differences, but this was the spirit of the time and certainly not executed with malice by Lofting. You can choose to "edit on the fly" if you like (for younger kids) or to use the opportunity to explain how attitudes have changed (for older kids).

Quite different from the movie, and certainly much better. It is a shame that for the movie they used just the idea of someone who could speak to the animals, but none of the wonderful stories from the book.

Amazing book. Doctor's character is a very inspiring one. Just imagining someone being able to talk to animals feels so fantastic. I've seen the movie but it's not the same. The story is plain though, characters are not very deep and there's practically no plot, it makes one hell of a bed time story for kids