JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

The 13-Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton

The 13-Storey Treehouse
Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton
September 2011
Pan Macmillan
Children’s Fiction – Ages 7+

It’d be almost impossible to find a young child who hasn’t heard of the Treehouse series by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton. There are now five books in the series, which is about two young boys Andy and Terry and their multi-storied treehouse full of creatures and fun rooms and hilarious, madcap adventures.

In this first book in the series, Andy and Terry live in a riotous 13-Storey Treehouse and whilst desperately trying to write their next book, they’re both being distracted by all of the crazy mishaps and nutty adventures occurring around them.

Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton have tapped into a childhood dream and transformed it into a highly successful children’s book series. Every child wishes they had a treehouse, full of different rooms and living spaces, with animals and creatures and enough toys and possessions to pass the time. In Andy and Terry’s 13-Storey Treehouse, there’s a bowling alley, a see-through swimming pool, a tank full of sharks, a library full of comics, a secret underground laboratory, a games room, self-making beds, vines you can swing on, a vegetable vaporiser and a marshmallow machine that follows you around and automatically shoots your favourite flavoured marshmallows into your mouth whenever it discerns you’re hungry.

Andy’s writing is hilarious. The pace is quick to keep children entertained, and there are some witty lines in there to entertain adults as well. The characters move from room to room almost every second page, and this keeps children engaged and in awe of the treehouse setting. The storyline is not overly complicated and is easy for children to follow. Andy and Terry need to deliver their next manuscript to their publisher, but Terry keeps getting distracted in the treehouse! And Andy can’t work out what to write about!

Terry’s illustrations are almost like sketches at times, but the page is always jam-packed with detail and there doesn’t seem to be a section free. The drawings must take him hours to complete, and the illustrations alone would be enough to keep children reading. The book is full of illustrations – they almost seem to be on every page – and with Terry Denton’s signature detailed drawings, children will be entertained for hours reading the book.

This is a fun, hilarious, heart-warming book for children aged 7+. The 13-Storey Treehouse is perfect for young children, and I highly recommend this for reluctant readers. There are so many drawings and illustrations, that children won’t even feel like they’re reading.

You can watch a book trailer for The 13-Storey Treehouse HERE

REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K Rowling

Harry Potter is an absolutely classic book series. It’s a wonderful world, filled with amazing characters and interesting storylines. It’s a series I can re-read many times without ever being bored, and I also always feel like I’m learning more about the world and the characters within it. I actually just recently wrote a guest blog post on this website about how I feel to re-read Harry Potter as an adult. Check it out if you’re curious.

I recently read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and although I was initially sceptical of it because it’s a play and it’s set so far in the future, I did thoroughly enjoy it and it was great to return to the world and find out what happened to my favourite characters from the childhood series.

The format of the book took a little time for me to get used to. It is an easy and quick read because essentially it is just dialogue that you’re reading, but you do have to concentrate on who is speaking and you have to concentrate on the physical scene descriptions to make sure you’ve picked up on everything in the story.

I loved this book. The questions that open up allow the reader to be absorbed back into that world, and through some events in the book (no spoilers!) we see some of our favourite deceased characters return, even if only temporarily. If anything, this book really made me wish that J.K Rowling started another series, either focusing on Harry’s children at school or focusing on Tom Riddle’s years in school. She is so good at plotting a story to build tension and suspense and then the book always propels you into a thrilling conclusion with many questions left unanswered.

I hope that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child isn’t the end of the Wizarding story for us diehard fans. Even though J.K didn’t write this script, she did plot the story herself and she was a part of the production of the play. It is really interesting to see what she envisioned for the characters after the conclusion of the Deathly Hallows, and I really loved the time travel in the book. It allowed the reader to go back to key moments in the series and relive them.

There are many things in the book that caused me to ask more questions, for example there’s a certain event that apparently happened just before the Battle of Hogwarts. This ‘event’ was a real surprise to me – I felt like it wasn’t forshadowed in the original series and it did seem a little odd to me in this play. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. This event propelled the whole plot in Cursed Child anyway, so it helped the story come to life and come into our hands.

I recommend this book to Harry Potter fans, and anyone who has read the original series or seen the movies. If you haven’t read the original books, I recommend you do that before picking this up. It’s not that you’ll have trouble following, because it’s a great storyline and it’s easy to read, but you won’t fully appreciate what’s going on in the book if you don’t understand it’s connection to the original books.

Thank you to Hachette for supplying me with a review copy in exchange for an honest review. I actually bought an extra copy of this book to offer as a giveaway! Feel free to enter below (AUS only).

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Potterhead July: What It’s Like Re-Reading Harry Potter as an Adult

This month I’m participating in Potterhead July, run by Aentee at Read at Midnight. All month long, book blogs (about 85 of them!) are posting about Harry Potter! The bloggers have chosen what they’d like to talk about, and for my blog post, I’ve chosen to write about what it’s like to re-read Harry Potter as an adult when you spent so much of your childhood loving the books.

Some part of me wishes that I could read Harry Potter for the first time again, where the characters were unknown and the plot a surprise and the endings all shocking and suspenseful. Harry Potter is one of the greatest children’s book series that I’ve ever come across – J.K Rowling created a world of magic that every child wanted to be a part of, filled with wonderful characters and friendships and heroism.

I recently re-read Harry Potter again. I’ve re-read it many times since I was a child, and with each re-read I discover things that I didn’t know before. There’ll be a sneaky line between dialogue that hints at a twist later in the book – a sneaky line I had missed all those times before that I’d read the book. Or perhaps there’ll be a particularly hilarious conversation between two characters full of innuendos that I hadn’t understood as a child. And as a child, there would’ve been many ‘big picture’ issues about the Ministry of Magic and the betrayal from certain characters that I just wouldn’t have understood, but I now do.

Re-reading Harry Potter as an adult can be very rewarding. The first few books are quite short and don’t take long to read, and you come to understand more about the world and the characters. However, what you miss is that childhood love for the world and that desperation to keep reading to find out about more spells, characters, secret passageways and potions. The entire series is complete and re-reading it is not going to stop that.

J.K Rowling could easily begin a new series in this world – James and Lily Potter’s story, or perhaps the story of Harry’s son at Hogwarts. I have no doubt J.K Rowling could come up with a villain just as scary and brilliant as Voldemort. But maybe we don’t need another series. J.K did such a marvellous job of making sure that every question was answered at some point in the series. Things that happened in the second book made sense in the sixth, even though we didn’t even pick up on anything being wrong (I didn’t think twice about Riddle’s diary until it was revealed to have been a Horcrux all along later in the series).

Maybe Harry Potter is meant to be one of those series where you spend your adult life participating in multiple re-reads. But if we had magic like the characters in the book, wouldn’t it be just fantastic if we could travel back and read it for the first time all over again?

The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events #1) by Lemony Snicket

Dear Reader,
I’m sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe. From the very first page of this book when the children are at the beach and receive terrible news, continuing on through the entire story, disaster lurks at their heels. One might say they are magnets for misfortune.

In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast. It is my sad duty to write down these unpleasant tales, but there is nothing stopping you from putting this book down at once and reading something happy, if you prefer that sort of thing.

With all due respect,
Lemony Snicket

This has to be one of my favourite childhood book series, apart from Harry Potter. And the first few books in the series are really only a couple of hundred pages, so they’re quick to read and wonderful to reminisce with when you’re an adult and you’re re-reading them.

Lemony Snicket created a brand with the Unfortunate Events books. The hardcover books and cover designs are intriguing and unique, and the frayed edges of the pages would draw in children in a bookstore or a library.

The Bad Beginning introduces a fantastic villain – Count Olaf. He’s vile and mean and Lemony Snicket includes such a great description of him that you can really envision him. And the three Baudelaire siblings are wonderful protagonists. Each of them are different, both in their personality and in their interests/talents.The Baudelaire children are forced to live with Count Olaf after their parents die, and he spends the entir novel concocting a plan to steal their fortune.

Lemony Snicket introduces an interesting writing technique in this book where he talks directly to the reader, and you can experience this first when you read the blurb. He tells the reader that the book is going to be unpleasant, and he momentarily halts the story throughout the book to inform the reader of certain things, for example:

Page 13 “over a dull dinner of boiled chicken, boiled potatoes and blanched – the word ‘blanched’ here means ‘boiled’ – string beans”
Page 18 “Please get out of bed and get dressed,’ he said briskly. The word ‘briskly’ here means ‘quickly, so as to get the Baudelaire children to leave the house”

Although I loved this technique and found it engaging, at times it was a bit much, and I think Lemony Snicket overused it. He could’ve dialled it back a little to fasten the pace of the story.

I recommend this book not only to children but also to adults who want a quick, easy read – something that doesn’t require any thinking on their part. I also recommend this book to adults who want to read something to their child.

My Score: 8/10

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people in the distance.

But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different from his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.

This is such a heartbreaking novel, not just for children but for adults. It captures perfectly the absurdity of the Nazi concentration camps, and the innocence that was lost.

The story moves forward quite quickly. Bruno and his family move to Poland because of his father’s new job, and he struggles to settle into his new life. His sister is cruel and it is quite obvious that she – unlike her brother – really does understand what Auschwitz is. Bruno feels isolated and learns to explore, and it is this that propels the story forward at a seemingly fast pace.

John Boyne has written this story through the eyes of a young child – Nazi Germany is seen through Bruno, who is trying to grow up within such a harsh and unrelenting time in history. He befriends a boy of the same age in the concentration camp next to his house, and the two become friends.

Their friendship is sweet – he brings food for his friend and they talk about trivial things. They learn to enjoy each other’s time, but throughout the entire novel, there’s a sense of dread. Somehow, you know that this story won’t end well and John Boyne achieves this by writing the main character as an extremely naive young boy. Bruno does not catch on to what Auschwitz really is, and does not understand why his new friend wears striped pajamas. Bruno does not really understand what his father’s job is, or why his friend is so skinny and doesn’t get fed.

This novel shows Nazi Germany in a subtle way because Bruno does not understand what he’s experiencing, therefore he does not dwell on it. Particular aspects of his life are described in short paragraphs because Bruno does not think them to be important, and it is this kind of storytelling that makes this novel so powerful and eye-opening.

My Score: 8/10
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