I feel like I would've been more favourable to this book had it been something that I had a hint of nostalgia for, if it were something I'd read in school and remembered fondly. It wasn't. This was the first time I'd read it, especially since it was something that never appeared on my elementary or middle school curriculum.

Being a farm kid myself, I initially could relate to Fern because I always wanted to take care of the animals and spend time around them; I spent a lot of time in our calf barn helping my aunt to feed them or out in the farrowing house helping my mother to take care of the piglets. I still can relate to Fern's desire to spend her time around the animals and tell stories about them. I spent a lot of summers in barn lofts with the kittens. However, it was only up to a point; when White decided that he needed to shoehorn in some childhood romance-crush-infatuation thing with Henry Fussy? I sort of zoned out and stopped caring about Fern (who, as it turned out, stopped caring about her pig because boys and "growing up"). It was sort of boring to have her go from 'interested in her pig' to 'I don't care about anything because I want to be by Henry Fussy's side in the Ferris wheel'. (Perhaps I also hate those kinds of stories because that was the kind of environment I lived in, where my farmer grandparents wanted me to stop keeping to myself and go find myself a nice farmer boy. At the age of 10.)

I get that it was written in the 1950s and by a man. I still don't care. That immediately removed a lot of the interest and relatability for me.

But if I focus on the friendship between Charlotte and Wilbur, which I probably ought, I find it to be an endearing tale. And that's where much of the positive aspects of the story are for me. A majority of the human aspects of the story could've been removed, and it would've still been coherent.