Book Review: The Parent Trap

Title: The Parent Trap

Author: Vic Crume

Publisher: Scholastic

Date: 1968

ISBN: none

Length: 111 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white photos from the movie

Quote: “Don’t you think it’s peculiar that we both look so much alike and—and have the same, identical birthdays?”

When Susan and Sharon meet at summer camp and people tell them “You could be twins,” they’re not pleased. They become each other’s official enemies and play pranks on each other. Then they realize that they really are twins, separated as the result of a bitter divorce, and that their parents still love and miss each other…and they cooperate to play pranks on their parents.

Of course in real life such efforts to manipulate parents tend not to serve children well. Of course the main attraction of the Disney movie of which this book was the novelization was that, in pre-digital days, it was very common for twin actors to play one child character, but an extraordinary feat for one child actor to play twins.

The comedy effects of the movie were mostly a matter of staging; food gets wasted, toilet paper gets stuck to things, a piece of a maxi-skirt gets chopped out to mini-length, and so on. There was also an unconvincing scene where, when the twins wear identical clothes, the parents can't recognize which daughter has been living with which parent for ten years. The movie did contain some wordplay that adds humor to the book, but grown-up romance takes over at the end.

Were the Disney versions of excellent books for children always inferior to the originals? It can be hard to judge for yourself; Scholastic paperbacks were distributed only through school reading clubs and secondhand sales, and though many public libraries used to have the English version of Erich Kästner’s Lisa and Lottie, they were encouraged to lose their copies. Some people didn’t think children needed to read about the rare cases when, in a conflict between parents and children, what the children want turns out to be the best solution for everybody. Or the idea that--horrors!--divorce might be just a very expensive way for a couple to realize how much they want to stay married.

I say it’s your call. My parents never considered divorce when I was growing up…and possibly that was why I enjoyed the lighthearted movie, with Hayley Mills playing both twins even in the scene where Susan cuts Sharon’s hair, and was delighted to find a secondhand copy of the book.