Rose and her younger sister, Snow, grew up in a splendid mansion. There they had a garden, a vast library, a statue gallery - and most importantly, twRose and her younger sister, Snow, grew up in a splendid mansion. There they had a garden, a vast library, a statue gallery - and most importantly, two parents who loved them.
That's how they lived until their architect father took a journey into the woods, from which he never returned. After a year, he was presumed dead. Their mother, a noble cut off from her family for marrying an untitled man, no longer had the means to stay in that wondrous house. So now she, her daughters, and the family cat live in a drafty cottage, right on the edge of the wood that took her husband.
Rose has accepted her father's death but wants to know why it happened. Snow won't even acknowledge the likely truth and watches for his return. Their quest for answers will lead them into the woods, where friends, enemies, and mysteries wait...
Content Advisory Nothing. This book contains nothing inappropriate for the target audience. It's fine for independent readers ages 8 and up. Younger kids can enjoy it as a family read-aloud.
Conclusions Snow and Rose is a charming retelling of the Grimms' "Snow White and Rose Red." While most novelizations of this story age up the girls, this one keeps them as children, because the Bear is (view spoiler)[actually their father, not a prince seeking a wife. (hide spoiler)] I love fairytale romances, but family also makes a good emotional core for a story. Considering this is a middle-grade book, family is a better theme anyway.
Other than that rather noticeable but justified change, the book does an excellent job capturing the mood of the Grimm Brothers. The prose does a fine job evoking the eerie, secretive darkness of the wood, and the contrasting coziness of the family's cottage. Martin's illustrations compliment the text perfectly.
The girls, their mom, their cat, their friend Ivo, and the Bear are all pretty likeable and lively. Quiet, mature-beyond-her-years Rose was my favorite of the group.
The one thing that bugged me a bit was how all the nice characters (except Ivo's somewhat Gaston-ish uncle) have an aversion to eating meat, or even to killing dangerous animals who were clearly trying to kill them. (Granted, many of those ferocious beasts turned out to be enchanted humans, but still).
I remember being a bit shocked as a child by all the wild critters who got shot over the course of the Little House books, but the books themselves taught me that the characters' fears regarding those animals were entirely understandable, even if occasionally misinformed. Those who lived in wild regions like that had to fight for survival. Fretting over the ethics of killing and/or eating animals seemed anachronistic and jarred me out of the story whenever it happened. Luckily it was only brought up two or three times.
Overall, this is a fine middle-grade book that even younger kids will enjoy listening to. A great choice for a kid who wants a fantasy adventure but isn't quite ready to tackle the Chronicles of Narnia or The Hobbit. Recommended, especially for fans of the Little House series, A Little Princess, and Frozen. ...more
The three Anderson children’s parents are going to France for a week’s vacation. With the usual babysitter out of commission, the kids are left in theThe three Anderson children’s parents are going to France for a week’s vacation. With the usual babysitter out of commission, the kids are left in the care of their Aunt Sally, whom they have never met before.
Melissa (age ten), Amanda (age eight), and Frank (age six)—called Pee Wee by his sisters—know very little about their father’s large, eccentric, Canadian family. They’re familiar enough with their Aunt Lyla, and they know that Uncle Edward drowned at sea on his honeymoon years ago, but that’s about it. They’ve never even seen a picture of their Aunt Sally; the only proof of her existence till now has been the card, featuring a moose with tree lights strung in his antlers, that she sends them every Christmas.
So they’re quite unprepared for the charismatic and whimsical figure that arrives, with her towering blonde beehive of hair, her fondness for green beans and surprise meat loaf, her talent for drawing, and most of all her storytelling abilities.
For Sally’s stories so transfix her nieces and nephew that they’d rather listen to her than watch TV. They’re the stories of growing up on Vancouver Island in the late sixties and early seventies that their father has never told them. The tales are full of witty observations, sometimes uproariously funny, but there lurks an undercurrent of darkness. Pee Wee is too young to notice, but his sisters do, and are drawn to it even as they dread it…
Content Advisory Violence: Sally’s Uncle Louis claims that the woods along the beach on Vancouver are inhabited by nocturnal trolls. People who want to get rid of something badly sometimes leave that thing on the beach for the trolls to find.
Unfortunately, the “thing” in question is usually a person, and once you give something to the trolls, you can never get it back. What do the trolls do with the people and animals they claim? No one knows—and there’s quite a few jokes earlier in the book about critters eating people, so we can strike that off the list. This technique allows the reader to fill in the blanks with the scariest thing they know, depending on their maturity level.
Uncle Louis and Sally’s brother John conclude that a neighbor mortally injured her own beloved dog to leave it helpless for the trolls. Louis also claims that he saw a little girl get left on the shore for the monsters by her babysitter, then the child’s parents retaliated by leaving the babysitter, which prompted the teenager’s parents to hand over the child’s parents….nearly the whole town had been taken by the trolls, so he says, when the grocers started carrying fresh asparagus at a low price, which saved the day. Louis is a health fanatic and he manages to bring every conversation back to the subject of eating one’s greens.
There’s also the Vancouver Andersons’ neighbor, Maud, who claims to have shot eighty cougars. One day she takes Edward, John and Sally on an expedition and happily shoots a number of small animals out of their perches, insisting that each one is a cougar. She also believes the mailman to be a cougar and shoots him, although luckily she only grazes his arm.
A boy jumps out of a window and hops frantically into a boat, followed by his demented uncle, and they are both attacked by the raccoon family that has taken up residence in that boat. Another kid gets his fingertip bitten off by a clam.
Sex: There’s a hint that the mother of a neighborhood kid, whom Sally cruelly dubs “Fat Little Mean Girl” had a scandalous past, at least by small-town 1960s-70s standards. Likewise, one wonders how exactly FLMG/Marianne herself got Edward Anderson to marry her, the event which led to both of them dying young. Like the activities of the trolls, this is left almost completely blank, and what the reader comes up with to fill it in depends entirely on the worldly knowledge of the reader.
Language: Melissa and Amanda are cutting and a bit rude to their little brother, constantly telling him to shut up and that he doesn’t know anything. Sally has no patience for this. One could argue that the girls learning to treat Pee Wee well is the whole point of the book, so their unkindness is there to teach a lesson.
Substance Abuse: Marianne was an overeater, hence her mean nickname.
Politics and Religion: Louis accuses a local pastor of leaving four consecutive wives for the trolls.
Sally and her brothers buy a product from a friend’s mom, who’s a Wiccan, hoping to cast a spell to make FLMG/Marianne stop bullying their sister. They sprinkle it on her school lunch, but all it accomplishes is making her barf all over herself.
I don’t think Horvath’s opinion on either Christianity or Wicca can be inferred from these incidents, but your mileage may vary.
As you might have noticed, some of the humor in this book is not politically correct. I first read this book in second grade and was never tempted to call anyone “Fat Little Mean Girl” or anything close to that after reading it. But if your young reader is the type to repeat whatever they hear, take note.
Nightmare Fuel: The trolls are almost impossible to see, because they always stick to the shadows, but Uncle Louis states that they have stony skin and craggy shapes. They make no noise, they have no mouths, and their eyes are little pinpricks of electric green on otherwise featureless faces.
(view spoiler)[Three kids leave their spoiled little brother for the trolls on Halloween night. The parents realize that the child is missing, and eventually a search party finds him. He never speaks of what happened to him that night, but he’s never able to bond with those siblings again either (hide spoiler)].
Maud’s house is full of taxidermy animals.
There’s a few anecdotal stories about people getting drowned, burned in their house as they slept, swept away by rogue waves, or being mauled and eaten by cougars and/or bears. Cheery stuff.
Conclusions
The week before Mr. and Mrs. Anderson were to leave Tenderly, Ohio, for the somewhat more bustling metropolis of Paris, their babysitter…came down with a minor case of bubonic plague and called tearfully to say she didn’t want to spread the buboes around.
This is a brilliant opening sentence, establishing both the surreal black comedy of the book, and that the Anderson children must be really unpleasant. Somewhere, Rosalyn from Calvin & Hobbes is slapping her forehead and asking “Bubonic plague! Why didn’t I think of that?!?”
I remember how that first sentence hooked me, carpooling with a friend in second grade. That family always travelled with audio books. I don’t remember the name of the narrator but she was outstanding, with this very clean, sharp line delivery and perfect diction that sealed each line in your memory. It’s been in my head ever since.
Within such a short novel—136 pages—Horvath conjures all these larger-than-life characters and makes them more real than some folks I’ve suffered through series of thick books with. They’re as bizarre as the dramatis personae of the Lemony Snicket novels, but somehow believable too—and the stories feel like real family stories, some exaggerated to comic strip proportions, others related almost exactly as they happened. I particularly liked how Aunt Sally tapped into the tradition of ancient oral storytelling by fixing descriptive epithets to her characters (“grey-eyed Athena” “swift-footed Achilles”)—“Maud who shot eighty cougars”, “Great Uncle Louis who came for two weeks and stayed for six years.”
The stories start out boisterous and slapstick, and become stranger and darker as they go, although the humor doesn’t disappear entirely (view spoiler)[until the very end (hide spoiler)].
The ending ties the present-day frame story to the main one in the past. You thought you were reading an episodic chronicle of family life, and all along it was building to a retelling of (view spoiler)[Joseph of the varicolored coat and the brothers who left him for dead.
With one crucial difference—Joseph forgave his siblings. Robbie never quite could. Even at the end of the book, he refuses to look Sally in the eye. (hide spoiler)]
I would classify this book as upper middle-grade, even though it’s short, due to the advanced vocabulary/sentence structure and the subject matter. If your kid can handle Inkheart they can definitely handle this. And it’s witty, poignant, and surprising enough that teens and adults reading by themselves can still be caught up by it.
Warmly recommended for anyone who likes a little depth with their humor and a touch of the supernatural in their family tall tales—especially fans of Over the Garden Wall. Speaking of OGW, if any of its creators are by some chance reading this review: ADAPT THIS BOOK. IT WOULD BE AMAZING.
We all know this story: Dorothy Gale is an orphan girl, living in a desolate part of Kansas with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. A cyclone carries off thWe all know this story: Dorothy Gale is an orphan girl, living in a desolate part of Kansas with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. A cyclone carries off their farmhouse with Dorothy and her beloved dog, Toto, trapped inside. The house lands in the colorful and whimsical land of Oz, right on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. The people whom that Witch terrorized hail Dorothy as a hero, even though the killing was an accident and the kid has no idea where she is. Her only way back to her family and Kansas is to seek the aid of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, who lives in a marvelous Emerald City. On the way, she joins forces with a sentient Scarecrow, a Woodman made of tin, and a Lion, all of whom have their own requests for the Wizard. Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch of the West plans trouble in her dark castle...
Content Advisory Violence and Nightmare Fuel: Parents reading this aloud to little kids should know that the skirmishes in the book are a lot more violent than they are in the classic 1939 movie. The Witch of the West sends wolves after the travelers, and the Tin Woodman decapitates them with his axe. She then sends crows, who get their necks wrung by the Scarecrow. At one point our heroes are menaced by huge tiger-bear hybrids called Kalidahs. There's also a giant spider prowling the woods (guess we finally know where Ungoliant wound up after fleeing Middle-earth).
Surprisingly, the Witch of the West is slightly less scary in the book, and the Flying Monkeys are neutral creatures with no malice of their own, but bound to a magical item and its current bearer, rather like djinn. The evil trees are the same amount of scary that they are in the film. The Tin Man became what he is because his axe was cursed to kill him – chopping off each of his limbs, then his head, and finally burying itself in his heart. He had a tinker replace every missing appendage with a tin one until he was all tin.
Conclusions Even if you think you have this story memorized thanks to the classic movie and pop-culture osmosis, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is well worth reading.
On its own merit, it's a charming and well-written novel that would be a great read-aloud for little kids. It's also a great choice for school-aged children to read on their own. Baum's narration paints evocative word-pictures and incorporates graceful turns of phrase, without getting verbose or throwing obscure vocabulary words at young readers. Some of the descriptions and dialogue get repetitive, but this actually enhances the bedtime-story feel of the prose.
Dorothy is one of those unstoppable child heroines of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature – along with Alice, Heidi, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, Laura Ingalls, Lucy Pevensie, and Scout Finch. Most of the original American Girl characters had that personality too. Strangely and sadly, we don't meet many new examples of this archetype in books these days. While Dorothy feels the stress of her adventure keenly and often cries, she never gives up on her goal. Compassionate and flexible, she'll also drop everything to help anyone in need, and takes great care of her three friends, always making sure that the Scarecrow isn't leaking straw and the Tin Woodman's joints are adequately oiled. Her age is never stated, but she's implied to be much younger than Judy Garland's portrayal in the movie, maybe nine or ten.
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The Scarecrow and Tin Woodman are very close to their film counterparts. Baum subtly shows the Scarecrow's intelligence and the Woodman's big heart throughout the story. They have some clever comedy moments too, like the Woodman needing his joints oiled whenever he (frequently) cries, or the Scarecrow being fearless in battle because his straw body can't feel pain.
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The Lion is less comical than he is in the film; he's actually somewhat fierce and intimidating from the beginning here. He's still a lovable character who doesn't realize how brave he is.
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The Wicked Witch of the West has a surprisingly small role, considering what a huge presence she is in the film. She stays in her gloomy castle for most of the book, only sending her minions after the travelers once they show up in her territory on the Great Oz's orders. Their intervention is justified, given how tyrannical she is to the Winkies, but her lack of page time makes her feel like a weak villain compared to her film equivalent. The movie actually utilized her better than the book did, making her the stuff of children's nightmares for generations.
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In the preface, Baum explains his intent to tell a “fairy-tale” without the grim (Grimm) life lessons and Old World aesthetics that had been embedded in the genre until that point. He succeeded at this, although the book feels much more like the stories that came after it than the fairy-tales that came before. He even invented a few new archetypes in the process – he was one of the first authors to feature good witches as well as bad ones, and the Tin Woodman is essentially a robot before robots became stock characters.
Unfortunately, sometimes Baum's commitment to escapism and novelty sometimes made the world he envisioned a little too bright and happy, lacking the spookiness of the Alice books or the melancholy of Peter Pan (its two closest competitors).
This might have do as much with cultural differences of the time as it does with the authors themselves. The Victorian era (in which Lewis Carroll lived) and the Edwardian era (in which J.M. Barrie and L. Frank Baum lived) found the British in a bleak mood, realizing the consequences of the Industrial Revolution at home and imperialism abroad. Meanwhile Americans were ambitious and optimistic, inventing marvels like the telephone, airplane, and automobile. Thus Wonderland and the Looking-Glass are pretty much stuck in medieval times with the card deck and the chessboard, and Neverland is a wilderness populated with Cavalier pirates, Fenimore Cooper Native Americans, and Midsummer Night's Dream fairies – while Oz has bejeweled skyscrapers and hot-air balloons. Baum's America is the America of Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers. Carroll and Barrie's England is the England of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Like Alice and Peter, The Wonderful Wizard is best-known through its adaptations. Most of us are familiar with the hugely influential 1939 movie. The film is largely faithful to the book's simple storyline; most of the changes are aesthetic and some are arguably improvements.
For instance, the movie combines Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, with the unnamed Good Witch of the North, which helps introduce Glinda as a powerful person early on in the story, while changing nothing of the plot itself. The screenplay also eliminates the lengthy journey back to the Emerald City and then on to Glinda's castle, which contains some interesting episodes in the book but nothing that effects the main storyline. It is probably best that these chapters were omitted, as there's no way they had the special effects to pull off creatures like the giant spider back then.
The screenwriters also saw the potential of the Wicked Witch of the West, who's scary enough in the book, to be genuinely terrifying. Thus they incorporated her throughout the film, where her constant hounding of the travelers loans the story a sense of urgency that the book didn't have. The movie also decided to make the Flying Monkeys simply menacing and dispenses with their complicated backstory, which would have been hard to convey without lots of exposition.
Aging Dorothy up is mostly fine, although her righteous declarations (“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” “You're a very bad man!”) would probably sound better coming from the eight-or-nine-year-old Baum pictured rather than a teenager. It's still plausible enough, given what a simple sort of character she is and how little human interaction she gets.
Given the limitations of special effects then, they couldn't have the Scarecrow doing all the crazy stunts he pulls in the book. Likewise the Cowardly Lion automatically becomes a bit sillier as a human in a lion suit. In the book he walks on all fours and looks as scary as any other lion (the famous bow in his mane seems to have been a cutesy touch from an illustrator; I don't remember it being mentioned in the text). That said, those characters are livelier and more lovable in the movie. I also liked that the film Scarecrow and Tin Man are clearly the size of adult humans – the book never clarifies whether they're scaled like humans or Munchkins, which makes some scenes difficult to visualize.
A change that bothered me a bit was having it all be a dream in the end. That works for something as surreal as the Alice books, but this story actually has a plot and the characters develop, making it a highly improbable dream. Apparently the studio execs at MGM thought that the filmgoing audience could only suspend disbelief for a fantasy world if that fantasy world was treated as imaginary in-universe. I would love to hear if Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had any thoughts on the subject.
One change that apparently bothers book fans, despite having zero effect on the plot, is Dorothy's silver shoes being changed to the iconic ruby slippers. Supposedly this happened because the producers wanted to show off their new Technicolor and needed a vivid red object to match the green of the Emerald City and the yellow of the road. Or perhaps silver just didn't show up well against dandelion-yellow bricks. I'm okay with both colors. Silver is more ethereal but the ruby slippers are stunning.
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The influence of this book and film cannot be overstated. Stop me if you've heard any of these before:
A farm kid, raised by an aunt and uncle in the middle of nowhere, saves the day with the help of some friends, including a big hairy beast and a man made of metal:
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A little girl from the real world stumbles into a magical one, where she and her companions (including a Lion) must defeat a cruel Witch who commands wolves:
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An ordinary girl is attacked by a Wicked Witch of the West Waste, and her only hope is a flashy Wizard with imposter syndrome. There's also an animate scarecrow, a dog, and a man magically grafted from bits of other men by a crazed magician (which apparently happens in a later Oz book):
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An American girl is swept away to a magic country ruled by an enigmatic mage, with whom she must negotiate. She befriends three of the strange creatures she meets on her quest, and they must follow a specific path to their destination or face certain doom. She had the power to go home the whole time but didn't realize it until the end:
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I could do this all day – the influence of this story is just that vast. While Alice came first and was clearly an influence on Wizard, Wizard took a step beyond the Carroll books by having a coherent plot and not being a dream in the end. It was an essential innovation to the fantasy genre as we know it now.
This book is the basis for one of the most important movies in film history, and itself an underrated but no less important cultural touchstone. It's an enjoyable read at any age and I heartily recommend it....more
A stunningly beautiful book filled with SHORT (as in 1 - 2 pages) stories about saints, historical/legendary figures, and mythological personae interaA stunningly beautiful book filled with SHORT (as in 1 - 2 pages) stories about saints, historical/legendary figures, and mythological personae interacting with animals. The content is fine for the smallest of children, but the beauty of the stories and the equally stunning illustrations make it wonderful reading for people of any age. I still find myself thinking of these little tales. They make me want to be a gentler person. ...more
The "Land of Elyon" in the series title is a small nation of fearful settlements, surrounded by a wall. Of the settlements, Bridewell is the closest tThe "Land of Elyon" in the series title is a small nation of fearful settlements, surrounded by a wall. Of the settlements, Bridewell is the closest to the Dark Hills outside the wall, which the settlers speculate are full of criminals and monsters. Precocious twelve-year-old Alexa Daley is the daughter of the mayor of another settlement. Every summer her father goes to Bridewell to consult with the other mayors, and she tags along to scrounge the library for information on the outside world.
When she's not reading, Alexa pretends to be an explorer or detective. She won't need to pretend this year.
Content Advisory Violence: A man plans a violent uprising which culminates in a siege, albeit with a low body count. The same man menaces a kid and tries to stab her with a poker. A brave squirrel is almost killed by two evil cats. (view spoiler)[The cats eventually get squished by a falling bookshelf. They had it coming, but violence against ANY animals is a no-go for some youngsters. Know your kids. (hide spoiler)]
Sex: An adult asks our heroine if she's ever kissed a boy. Just a weird question for a grown-up to ask a kid.
Language: None.
Substance Abuse: Pervis is frequently hammered. The book does not glamorize his drinking, but neither does it judge him for it. Alexa eventually concludes that he drinks to deal with the stress of his perilous job.
Politics and Religion: There are some Christian allegorical elements in this series. They are not obvious in this first book. I didn't find them preachy at all, but your mileage may vary.
Nightmare Fuel: Nothing in this installment, but plenty in the later books. Again, know your kids!
Conclusion The first installment in Patrick Carman's Elyon series is a solid middle-grade adventure/fantasy/mystery with a well-crafted setting and palpable sense of dread. Alexa is a brave and clever kid who has a good relationship with her dad and other authority figures. She never puts on airs about her intelligence. Looks and boys are not on her radar yet. Despite being very mature in some ways, she's still a kid who loses her temper and gets distracted by "unspeakably gross" things.
The story certainly borrows elements of Narnia and Middle-earth, with perhaps a hint of Alice, but Carman does not lift enough from any single source that it ever feels like a rip-off. There's nothing terribly original here either, but it is definitely enough of its own thing to sustain interest, even for a fussy elder stateswoman like myself.
Carman says in his afterword that this story began as a serial for his daughters, and the book maintains a bedtime story quality. This should be great for kids 10 and up to read alone, and younger can enjoy it as a read aloud....more
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