Description: The story of the bizarre adventures of the delusional Spanish knight Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, blends fantasy, comedy, and gripping narrative in a way that has appealed to children ever since it was first published. All the wisdom and humor of Cervantes' great seventeenth-century classic are to be found in Parry's very readable modern abridgement, enhanced by the delightful illustrations of Walter Crane, one of the greatest of all English children's book illustrators.

Don Quixote is a country squire from a village in La Mancha who goes mad as a result of reading chivalric romances and comes to believe that they are historically true and that he can become a knight like the ones the books depict. Mounted on bony Rozinante, clad in make-shift armor, and accompanied by Sancho Panza, he goes in search of adventure, mistaking the commonplace objects and people he meets -- windmills, flocks of sheep, a barmaid -- for victims or perpetrators of dreadful wrongs that he must right. Out of the resulting merry confusions, Cervantes has wrought a profound and complex novel dramatizing the collision between the ideal and the real in a world where the traditional certainties of truth are under attack. In the simple and universally appealing figure of Don Quixote, Cervantes imbued our ceaseless human quest for something larger than ourselves with the enduring potency of myth.

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