Tilly's Moonlight Garden by Julia Green

Tilly's Moonlight Garden is a great book. I went through it in five days! I read ALL day long; around 10 chapters a day. I liked to read it out on our porch. We have a wooden shelf on the edge of our porch and I balance on it with my back leaning against a column. I liked how it was so warm and sunny there in the afternoons.

The story is about Tilly and her friend and a fox. Tilly was very lonely when the story began so she played outside most of the daytime. And one night she went to bed and heard the fox scream it's terrible, howling scream! The next night she looked out of the window and saw the fox look back at her and then it ran off into the woods. The next morning she followed the trail that the fox had left her and it led her to a magic garden. It is funny because no magic happened there. I don't know why Tilly called it a magic garden.

Tilly made a den for herself there. The next time she went there there was rosebuds weaved into the grass that she weaved into the sticks. Tilly wasn't the one who put them there. She thought that it was a girl (that could be her friend) and it was! And then they met eventually in the den that Tilly had made.

I didn't really love the grandma because she only made oatmeal for Tilly. I liked how the ending had a picture of a flower.

What made me keep turning the pages and reading them all is it is just such a good story. I loved the book. That's all I can say.

by Anna

13 Treasure Trilogy by Michelle Harrison

The series I just read was very hard to find in the library because they are called 13 Treasures, 13 Curses and 13 Secrets.  My mother didn’t know which one was next because they all had the number 13 in the title. She got the wrong one out for me once. 

You should read the trilogy if you like books that are fantasy and mystery. The story is all about the adventures of three kids: Tanya, Fabian and Rowan (who went by Red in the first two books). They get mixed up in dangerous fairy stuff all involving Rowan’s baby brother who turned out to be her cousin. Rowan is half human and half fairy and works against the changeling trade. When she discovered that her mother was not her mother but her aunt she also discovered that her father was a fairy and she was not meant to be born. The fairies in this book are ugly. They can be human sized if they want to be and they can be seen by non-second sighted people if they want to.

I have a few bad comments about it and a few good ones. 

I loved the books. It was a good series but I didn’t like how the author, Michelle Harrison, once made the characters think that when something was good it was actually bad. There was a scene where the main character Tanya was being punished by Gredin, who is Tanya’s guardian fairy, the punishment was that when she went back home her old dog had turned into a puppy. It wouldn’t be a punishment for me! I think it would be fun for both of us.

I didn’t like the names Michelle Harrison made up for a lot of the places and characters. For example these names I do not like: Fabian, Gredin, Crooks, Tino and Oberon. I chose to pronounce them them wrong because I don’t like them and I changed them to Fabin, Grendin, Tinto and Auburn. The place that Tanya took her vacations at with her grandmother (who was second sighted like her) was called Elvesden Manor. It is hard to pronounce.

I couldn’t put the books down while they were exciting.I read a chapter every night and 3 chapters every morning in bed and then 4 chapters in the middle of the day. Each book has about 420 pages.

I also didn’t like how when you finish one book you don’t have to read the next book. In fact you don’t even know that there is another book. None of them end in a cliff hanger. I do like cliff hangers. 

I recommend that you do not look at the 13 treasures trilogy website because it will give you a sour taste in your mouth. There is only one video on it about Michelle talking about how she got her ideas from someone else. I didn’t like that they weren’t her own ideas.

It was kind of disappointing because the first two books are all about getting Tanya’s friend Rowan’s baby brother back from the fairy realm. They got there just when Seely and Useely Count were switching over from Summer to Fall. When they got to the courtroom they had to do a task and they completed the task. They went back to the fairy realm which is now ruled over by Useely Count. The Count said that they could have the baby brother BUT then when she saw him he was in a fairy family who loved him and he loved them. He didn’t even remember Rowan. So she just left him there. It was disappointing because the work up to the goal was great and then it failed at the end of the second book. I think it is unusual and not that good to end a story badly.

I can tell you about the Counts. There are 2 chief fairies who rule and all the fairies follow one of them. The Useely Count takes over rule of the fairy realm for Fall and Winter. The Useely Count is the bad Count. One fairy rules at a time then all of the fairies follow him.

I personally would not want to be second sighted (which means that you can see fairies). Because I find that it usually it gets you into a lot of trouble!!!

by Claire

The Fellowship of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien part one of the Lord of the Rings trilogy

I just finished reading The Fellowship of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien part one of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Its my favorite book that I have read so far. When I was reading it I couldn’t put down. Actually I could put it down but I didn’t feel like it. 

I have three things to say about this book:

• Where exactly is Middle Earth? My brother John swears it is in Mexico but I don’t believe him. Is it on another planet? Is it supposed to be on Earth a long time ago? It is not explained in the first book but it could be in the second or third book.

• There are two characters in this book who have very similar names. One is Saruman and the other is Sauron. They are both evil wizards.  Every time either of them are mentioned in the book I have to think hard which one of the two he is writing about. But I think it will become easier soon.
• I think that there are way too many songs. They are too frequent and each one is about a page long. I just skim through them.

The dark riders remind me a lot of John. They are always crawling around on the ground and sniffing people. John says that he is just checking Theo’s (our dog) odor level.

I did not really like that I watched the movie before I read the book because I know most of the exciting parts that are about to happen. The only thing that I didn’t know that was about to happen was when Tom Bombadil rescued the hobbits from the carnivorous trees. That part was not in the movie. 

I have just started reading The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien which is part two of the Lord of the Rings. I am just 28 pages in but it seems just as good as the last one.

by Ben

A Review of the Birds of Europe

Birds of Europe 

text by Peter J.Grant and Lars Svensson, 

illustrations by Dan Zetterstrom and Killian Mullarney, 

Princeton Press, 1999 

A while back I attempted to compile a list of book reviews describing my top ten favorite guides 

on my birding blog. I failed this milk-run of a mission and tossed up only 8 such reviews, the last 

two have remained unwritten. I've decided to temporarily skip #2 (The Shorebird Guide by 

Michael O'Brien, Richard Crossley, and Kevin Karlson) and cut right to the last, and in my 

opinion, best guide. Enjoy:

Have you ever ID'd a scoter by the way it dives? Or a Red-throated Loon by how it's neck moves 

in flight? Or distinguished the offspring of a Pochard male and a Tufted Duck female from the 

young of a Pochard female and a Tufted Duck male? No? Well that's probably because you 

haven't read this guide. 

This Princeton Press field guide is the ultimate bird guide: 400 sturdy pages of birding 

knowledge. Complete with amazing illustrations, 4-color range maps and comparatively long 

species texts, it covers everything from the Red-throated Loon to the Indian Silverbill. What 

other book fits illustrations of 20 Common Buzzards, 18 Honey Buzzards and 1 Marsh Harrier 

into one average sized page while still being completely visible? On top of the amazing quantity 

of the illustrations each picture is surrounded by field identification notes. 

Every description gives size, habitat, scientific name, the scarcity of the species in England, 

identification details and voice. The book include 848 species, 23 of which are introduced and 

103 of which are vagrants. Indeed every species recorded in Europe before 1999 is covered. 

Nearly every species has a illustration of a certain behavior, gives a side-by-side comparison 

with another similar species, or merely shows a habitat preference. Whatever the case, in the way 

of illustrations, this book is not lacking! 

One feature I particularly like are the family introductions. Most of these are just a paragraph 

long but a few, like the intro for the gulls, are excessively long (but not in a bad way). The gull 

introduction contains 7 paragraphs on IDing gulls, their food preferences, their molt cycle and 

general observation tips. Along with these 7 paragraphs 30 individual gulls of numerous different 

species are illustrated.      

  

The back of the book has a partially illustrated chapter on vagrants, a list of accidentals (rarer 

then vagrants), and partially illustrated chapter on introduced breeders. 

In short I have nothing wrong to say about this book. It really is the perfect field guide. All field 

guides at least attempt to set themselves at the top, but so far all but this one have succeeded in 

nothing more then failing when compared with this pinnacle of birding knowhow. 

Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl

Fantastic Mr. Fox was a GREAT book. It took me around 2 months to finish it. In the beginning it was pretty hard and then after a few chapters it got very easy. I read it aloud to my Mama.

The story was about a fox and his 4 small foxes and the mother fox and 3 unearthly, terrible farmers. Boggis was a chicken farmer and he ate "3 boiled chickens smothered in dumplings every day for breakfast, lunch and supper".  Bunce was a duck and goose farmer and his food was goose livers and doughnuts. Bean was a turkey and apple farmer. He never ever will eat food and he will only drink cider.

I think the best part was when Mr. Fox was down in the cellar of Bean's house when Beans' wife came down the cellar stairs and almost found the foxes. The foxes were taking 3 bottles of cider to go in the big feast. They had already got a few of Boggis' chickens and bacon and carrots from Bunces' property. They did not get caught and it was pretty scary for him but for me it was pretty funny.

I like that at the end of the book Boggis, Bunce and Bean were still at the foxes' hole waiting for the fox to starve to death "and so far as I know, they are still waiting".

I read the first page right off the book and the contents page and the front cover. And I read the book almost to pieces. I have been really looking forward to the movie of Fantastic Mr. Fox; I get to see it tonight.

If there is any kids in your family you should let your kids read it to you. And kids will love it just like I love it. Oh, and I forgot one thing: near the beginning the fox's tail got shot off and maybe it will be a bit sad if your kids read it to you. It didn't make me sad at all because it is just fake - it is not real.

by Anna

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I just read the Little House in the Big Woods and I liked it a lot. It's a true story written by Laura, a little sister with Mary, baby sister Carrie and their mother and their father, her father is a hunter. They live in a log house where "as far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month there was nothing but woods". They have cows and they have horses. I want a horse to ride through marshes and look for frogs (I don't think there was many marshes around for them to do that). It is seven miles to town and they only go once a year which I think is crazy. The kids have only gone ONCE to town in their lives!

I would like to go back in time and live then but I wouldn't like the Sundays though. "On Sundays Mary and Laura must not run or shout or be noisy in their play. Mary could not sew on her nine-patch quilt, and Laura could not knit on the tiny mittens she was making for Baby Carrie. They might look quietly at their paper dolls, but they must not make anything new for them. They were not allowed to sew on dolls clothes, not even with pins... They must sit quietly while Ma read Bible stories to them or stories about lions and tigers and white bears from Pa's big green book The Wonders of the Animal World. They might look at pictures or they might hold their rag dolls nicely and talk to them. But there was nothing else they could do."

I liked reading the stories that Pa told to Mary and Laura while he was cleaning his gun and then he played his fiddle to them while they were trying to go to sleep in their trundle bed. Pa tells Laura and Mary the story of Pa and the voice in the woods and the story of grandpa's sled and the pig.

I sped through this book because it was my favorite book I have read yet. I couldn't stop reading it. Garth Williams has made good black and white illustrations.

When I watched the TV show I was terribly disappointed how they acted. They were too dramatic compared to the book but the acting girls I pictured the same way as in the book.

Now I am reading The Little House on the Prairie which is the next book in the series. I think it is good but they are not being very nice to their dog because they are making him walk from Wisconsin to the Indian Country which is Kansas. They were not very happy when they had to move out of the big woods. They didn't like how everybody kept on moving into the woods they were living in every day. The new people were killing too many animals that the Ingalls needed to eat.

I think everybody would like this book.

by Claire Shamgochian

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

I know that it's my turn to contribute to this family literary effort. I watch my children enthusiastically plough through book after book particularly John, a voracious reader, and Anna, who breezes through a chapter or two before moving onto a new story. Then I compare them to myself. My reading period falls in the brief space between the moment that I get into bed and the time that my eyes close for the night. Consequently I manage to absorb at least part of a page every day, a chapter or two at most. This is the reason it has taken me the better part of two months to finish Wuthering Heights.

This was a book I had never read before. I hadn't watched any film adaptation of it either. I blindly walked into the story with a vague notion that it would be Jane Austen-ish. As I was expecting romance and flirtation, pretty costumes and elegant houses, I was absolutely unprepared for the book's ominous, dark and malignant story line and characters. Deep snow, isolated country estates and a vengeful ghost made peculiar and contradictory company for me on warm and peaceful summer nights. 

I had been aware of a certain 'Heathcliff' of whom a lot of bookish teenage girls were drawn to and now, having lived with said Heathcliff through so many pages, I cannot understand how this could possibly be character that that they were sighing and fawning over. If they are drawn this handsome, angry loner they are able to somehow overlook his base brutality. He is an evil man capable of extreme cruelty; he wrenches the fingernails off of someone, he hangs a dog, he terrorizes children trapped under his care and assaults women as willingly as he batters weaker men. Young Hareton, a boy who through a series of unfortunate events ended up being raised by Heathcliff fondly referred to him as his "Devil Daddy".

I hopelessly crawled through the dialect of Joseph who is the deeply religious servant living at Wuthering Heights. He is a bitter and mean old man who speaks with a very thick Yorkshire accent that is all pieced together phonetically for the readers. Copied here are a few sentences to demonstrate how difficult it is to get through Joseph's conversations.
"''Nelly,' he said, 'we's hae a Crahnr's 'wuest enah, at ahr folks. One on'em's a'most getten his cut off wi' hauding t'other froo' sticking hisseln loike a cawlf. That's maister, yah knaw, ut's soa up uh going tuh t' grand 'sizes. He's noan feard uh t' bench us judges, norther Paul, nuh Peter, nur John, nur Matthew, nor noan on 'em, nut he!" I think I'd have trouble understanding the man even if he were standing right in front of me, looking at me in the eye and speaking very, very slowly!

There was one thing that bothered me throughout the entire book. For the most part this story was being told through the recollections of an ever present housekeeper, Ellen or 'Nelly' Dean, as she knitted by the bedside of an infirmed guest. She conveyed to him the complex events revolving around the relationships of the people living at Wuthering Heights and their nearby neighbors. The story began when they were all happy, young children and progressed chronologically through to the relationships of those children's children. She recounted decades of memories in boundless detail. Nelly could recall every conversation: "she said, and then I said, and then she said..."  As I read I often wished that Emily Bronte had chosen a different approach in which to tell her tale as I could never get over the niggling thought that no one could possibly remember all that Nelly Dean did. At times she was actually quoting someone who was in turn quoting someone else. A triple layered quote for the reader.

If you are like me and frequently choose to read the introduction and preface of books only after the story has been read then you will, like I did, find the extremely helpful family tree printed in those pages too late. I ended up having to make my own weak version of the tree as I went along in order to more fully keep track of exactly who was who.

Having no previous experience with this story I was startled and relieved to fall upon it's happy ending. I was expecting the caustic curse of Heathcliff to ruin both families and thereby fulfill his perpetual goal. The tender, loving relationship that blossoms after so many pages of nightmarish situations left me satisfied. It stands as a reward for those who persevered with Catherine and Hareton though all the darkness.