Black Beauty is a famous story. This is an abridged version of it, and lasts for 1 hour. I play it at night for my 6-year-old daughter as she goes to sleep. Here are some of things she recalls from the story:
Black Beauty's mum said never kick or bite.
He never forgot this.
Once he went in the dog cart, but when they got to the bridge, Black Beauty stopped, even when the farmer smacked him and cut him, because the man with the torch said "stop, stop, the bridge is falling down."
They had to go another way at the four crossroads.
When he had to leave, his master said "always do your best."
At the new home they called him Black Beauty, not Blackbird or Ebony like the other horses.
When it got cold they gave him a bed of straw and such a lovely dinner, mashed potato and baked beans.
I read this book over several bedtimes for my 6-year-old daughter. The book plodded along but had a good finale and the pictures through the book were top-notch.
The story follows 10-year-old Oliver Crisp who is coming home with his parents "to the house which they owned but had hardly ever lived in" because up to now they had spent their lives exploring. Oliver is excited to finally settle down, except his parents go out as soon as they arrive to explore some islands that have appeared nearby. Trouble is they go missing so Oliver has to go looking for them.
On his journeys he meets Mr Culpeper, an albatross, and Iris, a short-sighted mermaid. He also gets to see creatures like the rambling isles, which are like islands but aren’t because they move and have bodies and faces beneath the water, sea monkeys, “small and smelly in their coats of green fur” and talking seaweed from the Sarcastic Sea.
Then there is the evil Stacey de Lacey who is a boy, because Stacey can be a boy’s name too, and who has kidnapped Oliver’s parents on a rambling isle called The Thurlstone, who is “very old and very bad. Bad men did human sacrifices in that temple in its top long ago, and the blood trickled down inside it and turned it wicked.”
As for the titular seawigs they are the wigs that the rambling isles wear (as seen on the cover of the book). Every seven years the rambling isles have a contest at the Hallowed Shallows to see who has the best wig, which are decorated with things they find on their travels such as shipwrecks and narwhales. “The winner of Seawigs Night is a sort of king”, and the Thurlstone is determined to win, even through theft.
The finale sees Oliver trying to rescue his parents as the Night of the Seawigsis taking place, but he gets caught by Stacey de Lacey and his army of sea monkeys, and only Oliver’s friends can save him. My daughter’s favourite moment came when she realised that the smaller rambling isle that Oliver had been travelling on called Cliff would come and stand up to the vastly bigger and more evil Thurlstone.
But like I said before I felt it plodded along before the finale, and up to then it was difficult to keep my daughter interested.
(I got this book through Amazon Vine UK. It is listed HERE.)
Also worth checking out is this page from Sarah McIntyre taking us through the process of producing the artwork for the book:
Throne of Glass (not to be confused with Game of Thrones) is the first full-length novel to feature the fantasy world of Celaena Sardothien. I read the second, Crown of Midnight, first, and wanted to read this novel to fill in some of the gaps.
It was interesting to see how Celaena met the characters I'd grown accustomed to, and how different they they were at first before Celaena got to know them. For example Dorian, the crown prince, started off as "a pompous, selfish idiot", or a "spoilt young prince", far removed from the character he was to become as she even "kissed him - greedily at that."
Anyway Celaena's reputation precedes her. She was a renowned assassin, the best. Then she was betrayed and sent to a salt mine, to work as a badly-treated slave, at Endovier where the slaves were lucky to last a year. Prince Dorian, along with captain of the guard Chaol, pull her out of there for the sake of a competition. The king wants a new assassin, "a right-hand sword in a world brimming with enemies", and is holding a competition for entertainment to determine the winner. For her she has no choice but to accept.
The oppressive king is responsible for the loss of many lives in his pursuit of power from his throne of glass, and has "outlawed it all - magic, fae, faeries - and removed any trace so thoroughly that even those who had magic in their blood almost believed it had never existed", so the mysterious magic-related things she discovers in the castle surprise her. This includes her meeting with the long-dead queen Elena, who tells her "Nothing is a coincidence. Everything has a purpose. You were meant to come to this castle, just as you were meant to be an assassin, to learn the skills necessary for survival."
As well as the mystery elements she comes across, and the fantasy, the book also has a simmering of romance, or not, between her and the young prince, or maybe the captain of the guard?
All-in-all a good book with many elements that should interest many a reader.
(I got this book through Amazon Vine UK. It is available HERE.)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a famous story. This is an abridged version of it, and lasts for 1 hour. I play it at night for my 6-year-old daughter as she goes to sleep. It has really caught her imagination. Here are some of things she recalls from the story:
The Wizard of Oz wasn't really a wizard.
Dorothy's house killed the Wicked Witch of the East and Dorothy melted the Wicked Witch of the West, and now there are only good witches.
Oz did help them, even though he wasn't a wizard. He tried to help Dorothy but the balloon went without her, because she had to find Toto.
The good Witch of the South helped Dorothy by telling her that the Wicked Witch of the East's shoes, if you stamped three times with them on, and told them where to take you they would take you there.
The good Witch of the North told Dorothy she had to stay in the East, because if she went to the West, where there is a desert that if you go across it you will be the wicked witch's servant.
The Wicked Witch of the West had one eye.
But she really enjoys listening to this and I'm sure she will be listening to it a few more times.
(I got this Audio Book CD through Amazon Vine UK. It is listed HERE.)
This is a review for the audio version of this book.
You get the complete and unabridged book spanning 9 hours 40 minutes and eight CDs. Not bad at all.
I play this for my 6-year-old daughter at nights. Her summary:
Queenie is the cat, Elsie is the girl. Elsie lived with her nan. Her nan got ill though. Elsie gets ill too, with TB in her knee. She kept scratching her leg. She goes to a children's ward and does get to see her grandma again, and to walk again.
Elsie didn't have a dad and her mum met Mr. Perkins, who never had germs on his hands, because he always washed them.
In addition to her comments I did overhear a reference to Diana Dors which is dated for the children of today although the story is set in 1953 so probably ok.
(I got this audiobook through Amazon Vine UK. It is available HERE.)
This is a book that I won in a Goodreads First Reads contest.
Crown of Midnight is the second full-length novel in the "Throne of Glass" series (not to be confused with Game of Thrones). It is also the first in the series that I have read and because of that I missed out on some of the backstory that was getting mentioned in this book quite a few times - e.g. Sam, Cain, the ridderak - particularly at the beginning. Therefore I definitely recommend reading this after you have read the first book in the series.
Despite this the story telling is good. The book follows the strong female lead character Celaena Sordorthien, the assassin for the king of Adarlan. She is straight in the action right from the off as the first chapter sees her entering a manor house with the aim to kill Lord Nirall. But the main plot is the assignment to dispatch Archer Finn, who is part of a rebel movement trying to interfere with the king's plans but is also "the most beautiful man she'd ever seen", and someone Celaena knew from before.
However there are all sorts of subplots going on too, like where is the king getting his power from, what are the answer to the riddles Celaena discovers, where has the magic gone, what is happening with the ongoing relationship between Celaena and price Dorian, or is it Chaol, Captain of the Guard, and all sorts of other things too.
All in all there is plenty to get your teeth into in this action-filled, fantasy thriller.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a tale of good versus evil. You may think that it is the fox that is the evil one as he steals chickens, turkeys, ducks and cider from the farmers, but the three farmers he steals from are not your normal fine and upstanding farmers; no, these farmers were “about as nasty and mean as any men you could meet”.
Even if you still think it is morally wrong to steal Roald Dahl cleverly addresses this too as Mr Fox explains to a doubting Mr Badger: “do you know anyone in the whole world who wouldn’t swipe a few chickens if his children were starving to death?”
And all the underground animals are starving to death because the three farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, one fat, one short, one lean, got fed up with Mr Fox taking their produce all the time so set a trap for him. They waited outside his hole with guns to shoot him. And when Mr Fox did come out they shot him but only got his tail as he shot back inside. But the farmers didn’t stop there. They weren’t going to give up until they had caught the fox. So they tried digging him out, first with shovels then with machines, then they had 108 of their men form a ring around Mr Fox’s hill so that it was quite impossible for him to escape, or any of the other animals, and waited for the hunger to force him out.
But because Mr Fox was crafty, or fantastic, at the end all the animals were having a feast unknowingly supplied by the farmers as the said farmers were still sitting on the hill, getting soaked by the rain, waiting for Mr Fox to come out.
I got this book for my 6-year-old after she watched the film of the same name. The film is different with this book being shorter. However she loves them both.
