Roverandom

So I read this because it is Tolkien, and I haven't come into contact with anything other than the regulation Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (and the Silmarillion, but lets not go there), so I was interested to see how his kids books worked.
I thought it was pretty good. There are the Tolkienesque elements such as touching on his mythology (which are fairly boringly summarised in the introduction and the notes section at the end), and or course wizards and dragons. Written around 1925, (the Hobbit was published in 1937 and the Lord of the rings from 1945-54) there are a few elements here which hint at trial runs for future works - Roverandom is carried by a seagull, the three wizards featured all have elements of Gandalf about them. Of course it is expected that his epic works were in progress much earlier than they were published, so who can say which came first?
I haven't outlined the plot, as there is enough description in the blurb.