The narrative is really just the glue around a well-designed series of incremental problems.

I felt like The Little Schemer should have given those (nicely incremental) problems more real-world context. I worked my way through it and was frequently left wondering "OK, that's clever - but why should I care?"

Clearly a lot of people find the book useful, I might be the odd one out, but I was mostly left scratching my head.