Book Twenty-Seven - The Wind In The Willows

Kenneth Grahame
dailymail.co.uk

Cute and fun book! I loved Badger, Rat and Mole - and even Toad has his redeeming qualities, I thought. I wondered about the rat, though. He's a water rat which I don't believe I'd ever heard of until I read the Oscar Wilde short story The Devoted Friend. Apparently "water rat" is the collective name for several species of rodent. Since the story is set in England, this water rat is undoubtedly a European Water Vole --  a protected species in the UK.

greengirlsglobal

Looks cute there, but in the next one he's a bit sinister, don't you think?

helmdon

Maybe not.

Apparently the book has been made into a movie several times and is even a ride at Disneyland! One adaptation is titled Mr Toad's Wild Ride. Now, see, I could go off on a tangent about how movies take just one little part of a book and expand and exaggerate it to appeal to their targeted demographic, but I shan't do that. (Although if I were, I could also speak about the movie adaptation of A Town Like Alice which ignored the second half of the book.)