Weekly Book Post - His Dark Materials
Feb 19th, 2008 by learningumbrella
The Tomten is a friendly little troll that visits all the animals of the farm on a snowy night and reminds them that “winters come and winters go, summers come and summers go” and they will see the spring again soon enough. An excellent winter read.
A Garden for Groundhog is another excellent book for these winter months. A couple plan their garden and prepare for spring and wait to see what the groundhog predicts. Anyone who has ever had too much zucchini from the garden will appreciate this!
There is a certain type of children’s book that follows a plot line of adding on to a long line of events, until suddenly there is just too much. The Umbrella is a book like that, with first a tree frog getting into an upside down umbrella, and then animal after animal joining him until it is too full and they all get dumped out in the water. It takes place in the rainforest, and the illustrations are very interesting.
The Golden Goose story from the Brothers Grimm is a classic example of the type of story I was just describing. This version by Uri Shulevitz is humorous and has his crookedy illustrations.
Bamboo Hats and a Rice Cake is a Japanese folktale, with the classic folktale elements of a poor childless couple, a special day (New Years), a good deed, and a supernatural reward. The story is told with Japanese characters intermixed in the text, which I thought was nice way to introduce the kids to the idea of the characters being like our words.
I also just finished the last book in the His Dark Materials Trilogy. I really liked The Golden Compass and I didn’t understand why it was quite so controversial. When the movie came out, and there was all that ruckus, I decided I needed to read this book for myself. It had some elements of mistrust toward “The Church” and these “daemons” that were really the physical manifestation of the people’s personalities, but the story itself was really just a gripping good adventure story with a spunky heroine and a surprise twist at the end. Then the second book introduces another lead character, and at that point I felt I lost focus with both of them as I didn’t care as much about either child-hero. The Subtle Knife seemed to suffer from middle-book syndrome, moving the plot along but not standing on its own as a good book. And the final book was the worst, in my opinion. If I hadn’t wanted to know how it all ended, I wouldn’t have kept reading The Amber Spyglass. The book kept going past what felt like the suspenseful conclusion, and the end “twist” was predictable and dull. All the controversy must be because of that final book, which got very religious. The religion parts seemed like they would go over the heads of most kids reading it, and the little vignettes that were making the author’s point about religion felt disconnected from the plot and felt pretty boring to me. I’m not going to comment on the controversy, because I don’t even care. It just wasn’t that good a book, so don’t bother reading it if you are a Christian and don’t like to see the orthodox questioned. And don’t bother reading it if you are secular, because it’s just not very good. It’s a shame, because the trilogy started off so well, but I’d only recommend the first book.
I really felt the same about His Dark Materials trilogy. I thought the battle scenes were pretty good, fast-paced, exciting, and that my son would love them. But he couldn’t get past the slow political stuff in the beginning. Basically, they’re too political/religious for my kids’ taste, and not nearly developed enough for mine. I was kind of bummed, after all the hype.
Thoughtful book post, as always.
We loved Garden for Groundhog and the Umbrella book looks real good.
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