| Juvenile Fiction |
Summary
Summary
'ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS!'
Paddington read on the glossy leaflet showing a large, sleek, silver-grey car. It took him a long time to eat fifteen packets of currants in order to enter the competition. And the Rolls-Royce he'd expected to win turned out to be one of ten thousand consolation prizes - a bookmark!
Then Paddington finds himself taking a driving test and, much to his amazement, is presented with a license allowing him to drive a rather unusual vehicle.
Author Notes
Thomas Michael Bond was born in Newbury, Berkshire, England on January 13, 1926. He dropped out of school at the age of 14. During World War II, he served in both the Royal Air Force and the British Army. He sold his first short story in 1945 to the magazine London Opinion. Over the next decade, he had numerous short stories published and radio plays performed. After the war, he joined the BBC Radio and later worked for BBC-TV as a cameraman from 1947 to 1965.
He gave his wife a teddy bear for Christmas in 1956. She it named Paddington after the London train station near their home. His first book, A Bear Called Paddington, was published in 1958. He became a full-time author in 1965. He wrote more than 25 Paddington books including Paddington Here and Now and Paddington's Finest Hour. He chronicled his life with Paddington in his autobiography, Bears and Forebears.
His other works included A Day by the Sea, Something Nasty in the Kitchen, and Monsieur Pamplemousse and the Carbon Footprint. He was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1997 and then a commander of the order in 2015, for services to children's literature. He died after a short illness on June 27, 2017 at the age of 91.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Horn Book Review
This revised edition continues the adventures of the cheerful but hapless bear. Paddington takes a driving test, models for a painting class, and mistakenly locks a neighbor in the sauna. The episodic chapters, which are essentially unchanged from the original, are full of humorous misunderstandings. Black-and-white line drawings accompany the undemanding text. From HORN BOOK Fall 2002, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
The driver's test mistakenly administered to Bond's endearing bear at the start of this new Paddington book almost does in the examiner--and readers too, if their sides are prone to splitting. In other episodes Paddington grapples with a hammock, locks neighbor Mr. Curry in Mr. Brown's steaming sauna, and tries to hold a pose as an art students' model. The book ends conventionally at a Christmas pantomime, just as the separate chapters all end conventionally with fond assurances of everyone's love for Paddington. But no one else could so upend the act of the stage magician, who saws Paddington in half between acts. As usual, much of the action stems from Paddington's punny confusion about English usage: when the stately home tour host runs out of beef Wellington, you know whose boots make a surprise appearance on the dinner plates. If American readers know about Wellingtons from familiarity with Paddington himself, they might well be puzzled by his use of mushrooms to mend imposing Mr. Curry's ruffled shirt. But they're sure to bear with Paddington as he tries the British decorum of everyone from the Browns and their no-nonsense housekeeper to the stately-home tourists who mistake him for Queen Elizabeth I. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 3-5, younger for reading aloud. The new edition of Paddington Takes a Testhas a more attractive jacket, wider pages, and larger type than the original American edition (1980). The minimal changes to the text consist of shifts from the English spellings of certain words to the American; for example, changing "centre" to "center," "colour" to "color," and "manoeuvre" to "maneuver." Apart from the jacket illustration, which is entirely new, Peggy Fortnum's original drawings illustrate this well-designed new edition. Carolyn Phelan.