A popular series of over 70 children’s books, all written by Stephen Cosgrove and attractively illustrated by Robin James. The first four titles were published by the author in 1974; the series is named after the title character of one of them. In 1978, Cosgrove sold Serendipity Books to the publisher Price/Stern/Sloan and continued to write new books for the series. It has remained popular and though titles lapsed and went out of print, continuing demand led to the author having their publication revived. Serendipity Books are currently in print and remain popular. Most of the stories’ main characters are ordinary animals or else mythical creatures, some generic and others of the author’s invention. Each story attempts to teach a specific moral, which is (usually) presented gently. Many of these lessons are uncontroversial, but a few may be the source of some YMMV. The plots range from the whimsical to very serious.
Note that Cosgrove has made revisions to the books, so some of the tropes below may not apply as described to every edition.
This book series contains examples of the following tropes:
- All Girls Like Ponies: The princess in the Land of Later, who sees Morgan the unicorn.
- An Aesop: Every book in the series has one. One edition has the stated lesson written right on the cover.
- Annoyingly Repetitive Child: In Sassafras, Sassafras the young elephant gets her name from the fact that she tends to mimic what others say to mock them. This infuriates her mother and teacher to no end, but she ultimately realizes how they feel when she meets a particularly obnoxious Answering Echo in the valley.
- Artistic License – Biology: Patti Caterpillar’s mother is a caterpillar herself. This is impossible as only adult butterflies can lay eggs. There are certain moths that remain in a caterpillar-like form their entire lives—the bagworms— but they look nothing like Patti and her mother.
- Jake O’Shawnasey is a green seagull. Seagulls, even Irish ones, are not green.
- Art Shift: Animal characters tend to be drawn realistically, or at least in a way that works with the real animal’s anatomy. Creatures of the author’s own invention, as well as humans, are drawn more cartoonishly, though never in a Disneyfied way.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The backstory of Morgan, the unicorn. In Morgan Morning, he is shown to have been born an ordinary horse, but while still a colt, he ran off after a group of raccoons, fell into a river and injured his leg while going down a waterfall. He would have died there, but before that could happen, he was healed by the Morning Star, on condition that he become a unicorn and go to “a land of dreams and make-believe”.
- Be Yourself: Several stories have some variation on this lesson; Leo the Lop plays it completely straight, teaching the reader that “normal is whatever you are”.
- Bittersweet Ending: Morgan Morning ends with the colt Morgan being saved from death by being turned into a unicorn. However, as a condition of being healed, he has to leave his family and friends forever and move to a “land of dreams and make-believe”. He may not have gained immortality either, as the poem at the end states that he would “live, maybe die, as a unicorn”.
- Glitterby Baby has Flutterby the winged horse avoid death by returning to Wingsong and her colt Glitterby, whose wings were not fully developed, manages to fly up to her and join her at the last minute. However, they have to leave Glitterby’s father, a mortal horse.
- Corporal Punishment: When Morgan was still an ordinary horse, his mother nipped him on the ear for running off.
- Deus ex Machina: The Morning Star in Morgan Morning rescues Morgan the colt from a certain death by transforming him into a unicorn.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Mr. Mole in Squeakers, who gives Squeakers the squirrel nuts in exchange for tufts of his fur and then just pulls some of his fur for himself when Squeakers doesn’t want to give him any more is clearly a stand-in for a real-world predator such as a child molester, drug pusher, or racketeer.
- Glitterby Baby is somewhat reminiscent of a divorce with a child involved.
- The conversation that Patti Caterpillar's mother has with her in The Dream Tree is much like having the talk about The Birds And The Bees, only in an inverted sort of way (she told her about what she would become - a butterfly - not where she came from).
- Ghibli Hills: The books abound with beautiful woodland landscapes filled with flowers and shady glades.
- Green Aesop: Puddle Pine, Serendipity, Cap'n Smudge, and Maui-Maui all touch on this.
- Magical Land: Several. Grampa-Lop tells stories about a magical forest. Morgan goes to a “land of dreams and make-believe” when he is transformed from an ordinary horse to a unicorn and this is supposedly where the Land of Later where he meets the princess is. And Flutterby the winged horse comes from Wingsong.
- May It Never Happen Again: In Feather Fin, the titular fish Feather Fin is curious about what's above the sea, despite his mother's warnings. He crawls onto the shore and realizes too late that, as a fish, he can't breathe oxygen, and he nearly suffocates until a wave pushes him back into the ocean. Afterwards, he vows never to go to the surface again.
- Oireland: Jake O’Shawnasey is about a seagull who lives on the Irish coast and is green. The Morgan stories take place on an “emerald island” but are not explicitly stated to be set in Ireland.
- Parental Blamelessness: Invoked in Grampa-Lop, which ends with the titular character, an old storyteller rabbit, being cleared of telling lies and the young bunnies being allowed to visit him again. However, the author mentions that "The older rabbits never apologized for the wrong they had done the bunnies and Grampa-Lop, for everyone knew that sometimes even older rabbits make mistakes, too." In this way, a blunt message that adults are somehow entitled to be unfair to children with no consequences is imputed to the reader.
- Parents as People: Squeakers' mother repeats "Always listen to your elders" to him, almost like a mantra. Squeakers internalizes it to the point that he thinks he shouldn't resist Mr. Mole's "bargain" to give him tufts of fur in return for nuts. When Squeakers' parents find out that this extortion is going on, they have to clarify that he is to say "No" whenever anyone wants to take what is rightfully his.
- The adult rabbits in Grampa-Lop don’t believe the young bunnies that there is anything magical about Grampa-Lop’s stories; they even accuse the latter of fostering lying in the bunnies and forbid them to see him again. They are eventually brought around to seeing for themselves that Grampa-Lop really is just a great storyteller and everything goes back to normal, but it is specifically stated that the adult rabbits never apologize for their prior behavior.
- Pegasus: Notably Flutterby and her daughter Glitterby.
- Series Continuity Error: Flutterby is described as being lonely and having no one to talk to in Glitterby Baby. However, other books about her contradict this altogether.
- Unicorn: Morgan.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In The Dream Tree, Patti Caterpillar’s mother is not seen after the conversation in which she explains to Patti that they will both be butterflies someday. We just see Patti pupating and turning into a butterfly and we never learn what happened to her mother.
- Wise Serpent: In "Kartusch", the titular blind snake tells the Furry Eyefulls that he does not need sight to enjoy the forest, he just needs the ability to listen. He tells them that they don't have to stay awake all the time in order to take in their surroundings; they will hear the nice sounds around them and dream about the wondrous things they've seen.
