Review: The Magic Tree House series

This is a Book Week review for the Tuesday theme of Summer Holidays.

It’s the summer holidays. There are many hours stretching ahead of you. What do you do? Read a whole series of books, of course. Well, that would be my dream and would have been when I was a child, too.

We discovered the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne when looking for some new chapter books to read to Rosemary at bedtime. We bought the first four and Rosemary loved them, so we got the box set of 28. We’re still only about half way through, but she’s still enjoying them.

The books are about brother and sister, Jack and Annie, who live in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania. They discover a Magic Tree House that will take them to places in books. It turns out that the tree house belongs to Morgan La Fey, who is a magical librarian, collecting books from all over the world and time (past and future, though mostly past) before they are last for good. Jack and Annie go on many adventures, to the rainforest, ancient Egypt, Pompeii, ancient China, Medieval England and so on and so on.  They are enlisted into the club of Master Librarians and help Morgan by saving books throughout history.

Jack is studious and careful, while Annie is somewhat carefree and has an affinity with animals and a little bit of a way of knowing when something’s good or bad. They look after each other.

The books are definitely very formulaic – each one is 10 chapters, with the first and last chapter being set in Frog Creek, and the rest wherever they end up. They certainly introduce the concept of the cliff-hanger and Rosemary is constantly asking for another chapter. They are very short books and it would be possible to read one a night, though we tend to go for 3-4 chapters a night.

While I’m reading these to Rosemary at the moment, I think they will be books that she is likely to read and reread on her own in a  year or two and I’d recommend them for children who have found their reading feet, but don’t want to delve into anything too deep.

The author has also written a number of companion books (none of which we’ve tried), which are fact files about the era of certain books (fact files on dinosaurs and the Wild West, for example). These look like they could be really useful in sparking off an exploration of a subject or a mini project for the really curious.