The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron is good, to say the  least. I had a little bit of a problem when the author used improper words such as "waked" instead of "woke", but my overall impression was quite good, and the author wrote this book in 1954, so perhaps back then the common term was "waked" and was different from what we use nowadays. Maybe this book earns a 7 or 8 out of ten.

David Topman and Chuck Masterson, the main characters of the book, are very fascinated with space ships and space travel, especially David, who dreams about flying one every night to different planets, and Chuck talks about space travel with his "grand-pop", Cap'n Tom, who used to be a captain on a ship, because his parents are traveling.

David's father, Dr. Topman, discovers an ad for 'a space ship, built by a boy, or two boys, between the ages of 8 and 11, who must be ready for an adventure,' and that is where the story takes us: watching David and Chuck build the space ship, bringing it to Mr. Tyco M. Bass, the issuer of the ad, and following his unique and peculiar instructions to launch and ride their homemade rocket into outer space, to follow a quest and mission to save the Mushroom People of the satellite that orbits Earth christened by Mr. Bass to be Bastidium-X, which is invisible to the naked eye, and is only viewable through Mr. Bass's unique telescope through which one may see the position and blueish-green mass that is Bastidium-X.

Chuck once remarks, "[Mr. Bass] must be a wizard", for he had said, 'you must bring a mascot'. They brought David's hen, Mrs. Pennyfeather, and little did they know that she would save the lives of the scanty population on the almost-extinct satellite--or is it planet?-- of Bastidium-X.

How does Mrs. Pennyfeather do it? Well, I'm afraid I can't help you there; this is a reading blog, to help promote reading, so why don't you read the almost-magnificent book entitled The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet for yourself?

Seeing Sugar

Seeing Sugar by Cynthia L. Brinson was a sweet  (pardon the pun-- wait, is that a pun?) grade 2-4 book. I think the book would've been better if the plot had been expanded and details added to form an older-grade novel, but it was good as is, although, I must say, not as good as I expected.

The book is about a fourth grader named Kate whose whole perspective on school changes when a new girl, Sugar Rose from Georgia, joins Miss Burke's class and Miss Burke decides to let Sugar Rose take Kate's seat, which she says is "up front and center". Since she moved to a seat further away from the teacher, Kate realizes that she needs glasses, and when she leaves for a trip to the eye doctor's, scares Sugar Rose with a mean outburst. Through her new lavender-colored glasses, Kate sees the world with a photographer's eye-- the leaves on the maple trees aren't fuzzy green blurs, but individual shapes with veins and markings, making each one different; even the people are different: her brother Andy is a boy with a deep passion for baseball, and the much-hated Sugar Rose is actually just a scared new girl, not the popular show-off in Kate's imagination.

This is highly recommended, and makes for a good read-aloud or bedtime story (maybe?). If you've read it, or are interested, post a comment-- I'd love to hear what you think!

--Dana

Moon Over Manifest Summary

Moon Over Manifest
By Clare Vanderpool
Age: Suitable for really almost anyone but targeted toward 10-12 year old girls.
Awards: 2011 John Newbery Award.
My Rating: Five stars+++++

It’s 1936. Abilene Tucker’s lived on the railroad with her father Gideon her whole life, but shortly after she turns 12 he decides that railroad life is unsuitable for a young lady like Abilene and sends her to Manifest, Kansas, where he once stayed. She’s to live with Pastor Shady Howard, an interim pastor for the First Baptist Church and a friend of Gideon, while he stays working on the railroad back in Des Moines, Iowa. Once she hops off the train, Abilene immediately begins a mission to find “some news about or some insight into my daddy.”
While looking for a place to hide her possessions, Abilene finds a Lucky Bill cigar box with all kinds of mementos in it, a couple of letters, and what looked to be a map under a loose floorboard in her new room.

Heidi

By Johanna Spyri

Apple Classics

Heidi, a little girl, was orphaned and had come to live with her grandfather, the Alm-Uncle, who lived a life in seclusion, and everyone in the village of Dorfli feared him, except the good pastor who was his friend. Nobody was comfortable with the situation at hand, but they ought not have worried for little Heidi’s sake, for she was as happy as could be, growing strong and healthy while frolicking about with the goats in a green meadow with Peter, the eleven-year-old goatherd. Then one day, Aunt Dete, who had led Heidi to Grandfather’s doorstep, appeared again, this time to take Heidi away for good, to Frankfort, where a wealthy man wanted a girl to be the companion of his invalid daughter Klara, for Aunt Dete thought that Grandfather did not want Heidi. But the muggy air, lack of blue sky and green grass, the atmosphere and population, these factors drove Heidi to despair and ultimate longing, for now she knew she could not go home as often as she wished as Aunt Dete had hurriedly promised, and if she tried, she would receive a cruel and harsh punishment from the strict housekeeper, Mrs. Rottenmeier.

I shan’t reveal too much, but hopefully you are now interested in this book enough to check it out at your local library. This book is: sweet, heartfelt, tender, loving, and warm, and some themes are: care and family and happiness. Heidi herself is pure, innocent, sensitive….

“Let me be, dear child; it is always dark for me now; whether in snow or sun, no light can penetrate my eyes.”

“But surely it does in summer, grandmother,” said Heidi, more and more anxious to find some way out of the trouble, “when the hot sun is shining down again, and he says good-night to the mountains, and they all turn on fire, and the yellow flowers shine like gold, then, you will see, it will be bright and beautiful for you again.”

“Ah, child, I shall see the mountains on fire or the yellow flowers no more; it will never be light for me again on earth, never.”

At these words Heidi broke into loud crying. In her distress she kept on sobbing out, “Who can make it light for you again? Can no one do it? Isn’t there any one who can do it?”

Now can’t you see that she is only mischievous because her heart is so pure and free? Making Mrs. Rottenmeier unhappy was not her goal at all, and although she disagreed wholeheartedly with whatever the old lady said, their lives were so completely different that you really cannot blame them for their conflicts. Mrs. Rottenmeier (how strange her name is!) had such a narrow, restricted way of thinking that one cannot help feeling sorry for her, for indeed she must have led a childhood of bitter feelings, and forced into these very same rules herself. Her youthful years were not full to the top with a run-with-the-wind kind of luxury, but most likely filled with dreadful needlework and arithmetic lessons. And so I hope you are sorry, for not only her but also for the people whom she affected with her outrageous ways, too.

Black Beauty Analysis & Thoughts

Black Beauty has had 9 masters over her lifetime, but only 5 of them were good to her. Here is a list of her masters:

Her birth master, “Master”
Squire Gordon of Birtwick Park

Mr. York

Mr. Barry (whose groom was Filcher)

Jerry Barker, the nice cab driver

Jakes, driver for the corn dealer

Mr. Skinner, mean cab driver

Mr. Farmer Thoroughgood

Miss Ellen

A few words about the masters:

Squire Gordon was very good to Beauty, and she loved the three happy years she spent there. But the mistress got sick and had to move to warm places.

Jerry Barker, a cab driver whose real name was Jeremiah, was great to Beauty. He had a nice daughter and son and his wife was named Polly. But he got dangerously ill, and the family moved to the country. (click title for more)

The Journey That Saved Curious George

The Journey That Saved Curious George:

The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H. A. Rey

By Louise Borden and Allan Drummond

This book is a biography about the creators of Curious George, Margete Waldstein Reyensbach, later referred to as Margret, and Hans Reyersbach, hereafter referred to as H. A. Rey, and about the effect World War II had on their peaceful artists’ life. When they got married in Brazil (they had both come from Germany seeking work) they took a honeymoon trip to Paris, and worked there in an apartment for four years. When the war began in Poland, they moved to the French countryside for four months, until it was too cold to live in the drafty house. Then they moved back to Paris, and when the German soldiers came to France, they got the right papers to get out of France and on a boat to Brazil. In Brazil they got on a boat to America, and the whole journey took four months.

My favorite part of the book is

Regarding Observations about Olivia Kidney

Regarding Observations about


Olivia Kidney Stops For No One


By Ellen Potter

On my first reread of this book I realized something odd. Olivia Kidney is, judging from the cover, a freckly twelve-year-old girl with thick ginger blonde hair in two ponytails, with cheery smile and crystal blue eyes. But it seems the book would not have you believe so. If not for the cover illustration, on which even Olivia is not portrayed clearly (she is about 3 inches tall on it) Olivia Kidney could have been a girl with black, blonde, brunette, or red hair, with blue, green, violet, black or hazel eyes and any complexion anybody could think of (Imagine an olive-tanned red-haired and violet-eyed Olivia!). It appears that if you write an illustration book, particularly a colored picture book, you tend to leave out what your character looks like. Really I suppose this author is so POMPOUS that she infers you will ‘get it’ after looking at the cover for five seconds and considers this a colored picture book (there isn’t a single picture in it save for the cover)! I didn’t, at first. In fact, if the author did not tell you that Frannie/ Venice’s hair was NOT butter-blonde or any kind of blonde, I would’ve assumed the girl was Frannie! I’m just saying maybe the author relies too much on guesswork and this could potentially go havoc.