Half-Hours with Jimmieboy

Half Hours with Jimmieboy is a collection of children’s stories by John Kendrick Bangs, the American humorist who lived from 1862 to 1922. The book is one of the volumes in the Jimmieboy series of children’s fictions that Bangs produced across many years, featuring the imaginative young Jimmieboy whose daydreams and active fancy repeatedly produce adventures involving the various fantastical characters that populate his invented world.

The Half Hours format suggests the way the stories were originally meant to be used. Each tale is short enough to read in roughly half an hour, making the collection suitable for bedtime reading by a parent to a child, or for the kind of brief evening entertainment that a young reader might choose for personal enjoyment. The tales typically begin with Jimmieboy in some ordinary situation in his actual nursery or garden, and then move into the imagined adventure through some small triggering incident.

Bangs’s particular gift as a children’s writer was for the kind of cheerful nonsense that took ordinary situations and inflated them into comic absurdity without ever becoming threatening. The Jimmieboy stories never produce real fear and always resolve happily, but they have enough invention to keep young readers engaged through the various adventures. The talking animals, the personified household objects, and the various fairy tale creatures that turn up in the stories are handled with the kind of warm wit that Bangs had developed in his adult humour and that translated well into the children’s market.

The collection runs about two hundred pages. It is one of the volumes most often used by readers approaching the Jimmieboy series. It pairs naturally with the other Jimmieboy books including Bikey the Skicycle.