At the beginning of the second part of Don Quixote, published 10 years after the first part, Cervantes, not shy about self-promotion, embeds a character who comments on the great popularity of part one. “Children leaf through it, adolescents read it, grown men understand it and old men praise it.” In this 17th-century version of the modern publicist’s “for readers from nine to ninety-nine,” Cervantes reveals that even then children were creating abridgements of his substantial tale of an addled hero.

In Tales of Don Quixote the ever-versatile Barbara Nichol presents, for our own young readers, her selection of the adventures of the sad-faced knight. As I’m supposedly at the grown-up age where I should have read and understood Don Quixote, I kept Nichol in abeyance for a week or so while I immersed myself in the original, a first-time read for me. As I meandered along with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, I asked myself what was potentially appealing to children in this narrative.

First and most obvious was the Winnie-the-Pooh factor. Don Quixote is a knight of very little brain and in this story the reader is always smarter than the hero. Nothing makes a reader feel more satisfied than superiority, and in Don Quixote this satisfaction is available on every page.

The second potential appeal was humour. Like a comedy smorgasbord, this story has slapstick, satire, puns, farce, guys dressed up as damsels, scatological jokes, and a particular form of post-modern Monty Pythonesque absurdity that is likely to make young fans of Jon Scieszka’s picture books feel right at home. Finally, and this is the one that makes some adults uncomfortable, the narrative is regularly punctuated by violence. Characters are bashed, kicked, stoned, impaled, slugged, and sliced up.

On the other hand, mitigating against Don Quixote for the child audience are its length, confusing digressions, and the fact that many of the incidents simply don’t make any logical or emotional sense. My most common question while reading was “Huh?”

In her retelling, Barbara Nichol gives us a gem. She provides innovative solutions to the problems the work presents, while she retains and embellishes its potential strengths for young readers. From the vast plain of the first part of the original, Nichol chooses only incidents that directly involve Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, omitting interpolated romances, poems, and songs, and neatly condensing many of the more leisurely speeches. She approaches confusing bits head-on, with a narrator whose most common gesture is a shrug. Instead of trying to tidy up the original she acknowledges its frequent dottiness. “For what was now to come, I think we can give credit to our hero’s love for Lady Dulcinea. Otherwise it makes no sense at all.” “If you, dear reader are a bit confused, you’ll be forgiven. Nor will you be blamed if you are hopelessly confused. Love is confusing in real life as well, but not quite in this way. But onward.” This insouciant narrative voice is the key to the book’s appeal. It invites us in, it keeps the action moving right along, and it replicates the buoyant cheekiness of the original.

Nichol is much more open about the sex, vulgarity, and violence in Cervantes than writers who have penned the other children’s versions I consulted. The young women who are hanging around the doors of an inn that Don Quixote approaches are described in other versions as “wenches.” Nichol tells it a bit more like it is: “These ladies were not maidens. What shall I say? These were women who were hired by the night by travelers – and not just the weary kind – eager for a little female company along the way.” Gross bits abound, but the narrator warns us in advance, with a wink. “Readers who are squeamish or refined would be better off rejoining us in a page or so. The rest of us, of ruddy sensibilities, will plunge ahead.” When it comes to the violence, Nichol cleverly retains the spirit of the original, in which both heroes and enemies bounce back, Popeye-style, from their various bashings.

The job of retelling a classic for children must be intimidating. Nichol’s lightness of touch is obviously born of the confidence of scholarship. The producer of a three-part CBC Radio documentary on Don Quixote, she knows her material so well that she even ventures to add a few touches of her own. One I liked involves a scene in which Sancho Panza is tossed up in a blanket by some ruffians. Far worse things happen to him, but this is the indignity that rankles. Our view of this event comes via Don Quixote who is, for complicated reasons, watching the tossing from the far side of a wall. What he sees therefore is a series of views of his squire airborne, then disappeared behind a wall, then airborne again. In the original, the chubby Sancho Panza is described, one assumes sardonically, as graceful in his plight. Nichol gives us a more detailed picture. “He watched his servant come and go against the bright blue sky – sprawling like a starfish at one sighting, curled up like an infant at the next.” With similes like these, who needs movies?

Why create a version of Don Quixote for children? The main motive must be that it’s a dandy story, and in Nichol’s hands it remains so. A child’s version also invites readers to join the community that understands “quixotic” and “tilting at windmills,” phrases that have entered our cultural lexicon. There’s also a chance some of Nichol’s readers will, in time, tackle the big fat original and have as good a time as I did.