Hilda’s Restful Chair by Iris Schweitzer, 1981.

One hot morning, Hilda finishes watering her garden and decides that she needs to rest for a while.

When Hilda needs to rest, she has a special place she likes to go – an old armchair that she keeps in a shed. She calls the chair her “restful chair.”

Hilda is joined in her restful chair by Osbert the wombat and Cadbury the cat. However, Osbert and Cadbury aren’t the only animals who enjoy the restful chair. Soon, a pair of rabbits ask to join the others in the chair.

As Hilda and her animal friends sit in the restful chair, other animals come to join them. As the chair becomes more loaded with animals, it starts to creak and groan.

Eventually, the chair just can’t take it anymore, and it falls over, dumping everyone onto the floor.

Still, all the animals decide that they had a good rest. As the animals leave, Hilda sets the chair up again, and she and her animal friends go inside to have some watermelon.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

This is a cute, fun story about animals who enjoy a comfortable chair as much as a little girl. Kids like stories with repetition, and they would probably enjoy seeing the parade of animals who come to join Hilda in her chair. They would probably also see the ending coming, that the chair won’t be able to hold everyone. It’s just a question of which animal is going to be the last straw for the chair. Fortunately, no animals were harmed by this experience, and even the chair seems okay, even though it fell over.

Because there is a wombat in the story, I assumed that the story takes place in Australia. It probably does, but from the publication information, it looks like it was first printed in Great Britain. The author was originally from Israel, but she was living in London at the time the book was published.