I remember having Heidi as a child, though for the life of my I can't recall which edition. I've flipped my way through some of the hundreds listed by Goodreads, but none of them look familiar. A surprising amount of them have a yellow-haired child on the cover, though, which is odd as the book is very clear about her having black hair. It makes me wonder what instigated the change to blonde, because that's how I remembered Heidi, all these years later, so somehow the change seems to have stuck.

Anyway, it's a nice little story. Peter's a total shit, but his mother and grandmother are fairly awful to him, always preferring another child and thinking theirs is not that great. (I mean he isn't, but still. Maybe if they pretended a little more often that their son and grandson wasn't a crushing disappointment then he wouldn't be such a brat.) Heidi herself is frankly too good to be true, but then that's par for the course for pretty much the whole book - it's layered over with such a golden glow of idealism that it's pretty much just removed from reality. I like that nearly everyone is well-meaning and kind, but the idealism of rural peasant life gets to be a little much. Strip away the sappy picture of Heidi growing strong and healthy off the odd glass of goat's milk and nearly nothing else, that life seems like it would be hard and cold and hungry.