Classic Short Story Review – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (4/5 stars)

Reading Level: All Ages
Genre: Classic
Length: 48 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Release Date: December 26, 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1497483736
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Bought
Rating: 4/5 stars

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a short story by American author Washington Irving, contained in his collection of 34 essays and short stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Written while Irving was living abroad in Birmingham, England, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was first published in 1820. Along with Irving’s companion piece “Rip Van Winkle”, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is among the earliest examples of American fiction with enduring popularity.

I read this short story to my 10 year old son out loud. He had just seen the cartoon and was interested in hearing the original story. While this is a good story, the language it’s written is pretty archaic and very flowery. It takes a really long time to get to the point. While it sounds neat to read out loud, it is also very hard to read out loud because of how dated the speech patterns and terminology are.

Overall while it was neat to read the original story, everyone agreed it was a bit hard to understand because of the archaic language and got boring at parts because of how wordy it was. The story does have a certain charm to it and some of the descriptions were absolutely fabulous. If you are super interested in reading the original Sleepy Hollow story this isn’t a bad read. However, it’s not one I would read out loud and not one that is super engaging and entertaining.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Mount TBR Reading Challenge
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge