Children's Space Books Books

Great buy. Nice story to read to kids if they are too young to read.

Like the first book The Great Galaxy Goof, this second in the Astro Kids series is great for fun-loving children. Robert Elmer has filled a void!

This book by Australian authors Damien Broderick and Rory Barns was a little gem I found when I was searching the school library a couple of years ago. I was starting to find time travel interesting (though not hard SF) and this looked interesting so I borrowed it and what a reward! The basic plot centres on teenager Jenny who lives in suburban Melbourne, Australia with her father. Her mother, soon to be remarried, has left home. Jenny is an above average physics student but leads a relatively normal life, with her boyfriend David, best friend Maddy, and new stepbrother Tristan. Until she answers a phone call from the past. The plot is simple but well presented with an example of the Quantum theory and how it affects history and the future. I will refrain from giving out any more plot details because there are a few plot twists from there. All in all it was a great read, even if it didn't take too long and another example of great home-grown fiction.

This book gives the reader a very brief view of history and how the evils of this world has a domino effect on us all. It also reminds us that we [humans] can survive in the worst of times with the help of family and friends. It is well written and gives you a good mental image of what you are reading.

The Devil's Arithmetic is a remarkable book about a horrid event in our history. For naysayers, it provides a mountain of evidence that must be heralded. For the rest of us, it is a reminder that we must in fact remember the atrocities of the Holocaust so that they are not repeated.

Yolen weaves together the tales of Hannah/Chaya in this historically fictional book. Hannah, a modern-day teenager, is 'tired of remembering'. Her family's rituals at Passover bore her and like any typical teen, would rather hang out with friends. That is, until she is chosen during the ritual, to open the door to Elijah the Prophet. When she does, she steps back in time and morphs into Chaya, a young girl who eventually is sent to one of the dreaded concentration camps. While Hannah/Chaya stuggles with the reconciliation of what she knows from the future and what she is living in 1942, the horrors of the Holocaust and Hitler's Final Solution surround her.

If this is not required reading at your school, it most certainly should be. I know I will be recommending it to my students when we return to school in August.

THE DEVIL'S ARITHMETIC by Jane Yolen is required reading at my school, as it is in many middle/junior high schools across the country. I've been meaning to read it for several years but never did, until my son read it this year as an eighth grader. He insisted I read it. How could I resist that?

Hannah is celebrating Passover Seder with her family. It's the same thing every year. Grandpa will get all worked up over old photos on TV, shaking his fist, screaming about the numbers on his arm, and Aunt Eva will calm him down as she always does, laying a hand on his arm, leading the same old Jewish prayers as Hannah mumbles along. But this year will be different. Hannah's brother, Aaron, will get to hide the afikoman, Hannah will get to taste real wine, and then she'll get to open the door to symbolically welcome in the prophet Elijah.

But when she opened that door, she had no idea just how different this year's celebration would be.

Instead of seeing the hallway in front of her as she expected, she sees a man coming her way, crossing a field. Confused, she turns back to her family and instead sees a strange woman, dressed even more strangely, kneading dough on a wooden table. Hannah's confusion grows as she hears herself referred to as Chaya, and discovers that these two people believe themselves to be her Aunt Gitl and Uncle Shmuel. More unbelievably, they talk about her parents' deaths, and that she herself had nearly died, sick for weeks.

Feeling like she's in a dream she can't wake up from, she finds herself pulled into wedding festivities, which includes walking to a nearby village for the celebration. There, her dream turns into a nightmare. Hannah is slowly disappearing as Chaya is loaded onto trucks with the other villagers. Then, later, they are prodded like cattle aboard boxed railroad cars with no ventilation, and they travel, standing, for four days and nights without food or bathrooms. What follows is days, weeks, maybe months, in a Jewish concentration camp.

Jane Yolen's telling of the Holocaust is chilling. She gathered information from survivors, those heroes who remember so that the atrocities of the past will never happen again. Ms. Yolen writes in her final pages to the reader, "That heroism - to resist being dehumanized, to simply outlive one's tormentors, to practice the quiet, everyday caring for one's equally tormented neighbors. To witness. To remember. These were the only victories of the camps."

This book is incredibly powerful. The way Ms. Yolen weaves the past and present together forces the reader to make personal connections. She makes the reader think and ask questions. How could society have allowed such a thing to happen? And, more importantly, how can we assure that it will never happen again? I truly hope THE DEVIL'S ARITHMETIC will remain required reading in schools. Each new generation must bear the weight of those lost souls upon their heart. They must believe that such devastating events can, and did, happen. Only in believing and remembering can we move forward to a better society.

Thank you, Ms. Yolen, for this riveting and thought-provoking book.

Reviewed by: Cana Rensberger

Hannah has better things to do that spend the annual Seder listening to her grandparents go on about the Holocaust. However, when she is chosen to perform the ritual of opening the door to welcome the prophet Elijah, she is transported back to Poland in the 1940s. Everyone calls her Chaya and she begins to forget about her life as Hannah. It isn't long before Nazis take the small community to a concentration camp. While there, Chaya/Hannah becomes friends with Rivka, a 10-year-old girl who has lost everyone in her family except her brother. Rivka teaches Chaya and her friends the best ways to survive the horrors of the camp. However, no one is ever safe in the camps.

Writing about the Holocaust for children is especially difficult, given the disturbing subject matter and lack of reason. Yolen's book is able to portray the insanity of life in the concentration camps while also showing how survivors maintained their individuality. Hannah/Chaya's voice is wellwritten and, by having Hannah lose herself in Chaya's life, Yolen creates a sense of suspense. Readers will learn about the Holocaust from Hannah's experiences, but will also learn about the importance of remembrance.

I absolutely could not put this down. I highly recommend it for young readers who are wondering about this event in our history.

I don't know that I would classify Clark as a creator of great fiction; as mentioned in other reviews, the "human equation" in his works is largely missing. Clark excels and creating vivid descriptions of technology and alien grandeur, but his books are a bit lifeless at they have almost no character developement or interesting dialog.

I've read most of his books, and find he is a great alternative in those times I would find myself reaching for an atlas or a National Geographic. Honestly, I think AC Clarke is one of those sacred cow authors--praised by those who think it raises their intellectual profile, and read mainly when bored by those who can see that the emperor, while not entirely naked, could do with more than a loincloth.

It is hard to believe that it has been forty years since 2001, the book and the film, was released. In 1968 it was a strange, mind bending, fascinating vision of the future. It is a worthy monument to the vision of Arthur C. Clarke, bard of the space age.

**Some Spoilers!***

Love how Clarke uses factual science like the most obvious crater on the moon to house the monolith, the tycho crater, as well as the very strange Saturn moon that has an all white side, Iapetus. How more obious can an alien make it for us to make first contact by keeping monoliths in the center of these obvious places? Besides the changes from jupiter orbit to the Saturn moon as staging grounds for the stargate I found the book to be similar to the movie/ book "Contact" by Carl Sagan. Not sure if you've seen or read, but i think Carl has read 2001. His story involved his character going through a wormhole to end up in a familiar earth environment (the beach) as well so as to be comfortable. Very similar here although in 2001 it is a hotel room, from that point however the stories change. A signal from deep space was sent to earth in Contact and from the moon monolith to deep space in 2001.

I did know that Bowman became something more from watching the sequel 2010 but not from 2001. Wonder why Kubrik left all that out.

Because Arthur C. Clarke recently died I decided to reread his classic novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some people say that the major knock against science fiction is that it's necessarily dated soon after written because of the progress of society and technology. While this may be true of many stories, 2001 is timeless. It's hopeful, it's beautiful and it's filled with themes that speak to what we are as humanity.

Evolution is probably the most important element of the story. From the beginning when primitive man finds a black obelisk and it teaches the concept of tool use and subtly changes these creature's minds the idea that our improbable evolution was guided by alien intervention. Then, just as humanity gained the power to destroy its own planet those same aliens had planned to help the descendants of those early creatures jump to the next step, as equal in advancement as using stones for tools were to starving primitives. The message I took from the story was that we are limited in how forward we can think and until we break through another evolutionary barrier we'll be butting our heads against an invisible barrier on creativity. It's profound and humbling to consider the possibility that there are beings who look at our restrictions as simplistic as we view the idea of making a fire for survival.

Invariably this novel gets compared with the Stanley Kubrick film and rightly so. Unlike any pair I've encountered, both the novel and screenplay were developed simultaneously and in conjunction. With slight differences the stories are complementary and equally brilliant. What makes me favor the book more than the movie is the ending, which is explained better revealing the true scope of the evolutionary step man is about to make.

- CV Rick, April 2008

Goodbye! Your legend will endure as long as their is a mankind alive to read your words.

One of the great sci-fi books. Does anyone need to say more?

Now that the Harry Potter saga's come to a conclusion, there may be a little void left for the reader - child or adult - who enjoyed the type of fantasy that J.K. Rowling did so well: complex in plot but simple enough in language to be accessible to younger readers as well. Certainly, the best in the bunch would be The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit) by Tolkien, but there are other choices out there, with probably the best of the rest being Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Then there is Clive Barker's Abarat.

With the popularity of Harry Potter, a number of "adult" writers took their shot at writing for a younger audience with mixed success. Barker, one of the great horror fantasists around today, was not one of these bandwagon jumpers, having already written one good "juvenile" novel, The Thief of Always, long before anyone knew who Harry Potter was. With Abarat, he starts a series of books with a similar young-and-adult-alike audience in mind.

Abarat uses one of the standard fantasy plot devices involving a youngish girl named Candy Quackenbush who discovers a world beyond her mundane existence, one in which she has a great destiny. For Candy, the mundane world is her life in Chickentown, a dull town with one industry (poultry, of course), where she lives with her family that may not be at a Dursley-level of nastiness, but is nonetheless a rather unpleasant one (due, in large part, to an alcoholic, abusive father).

Candy's life changes when she encounters the master thief, Mischief. It doesn't take long for Candy to realize he's something extraordinary: after all, he has seven other heads at the end of antlers. Mischief is being pursued by another strange creature named Shape, and in the process of helping Mischief escape, Candy is transported to another world called the Abarat. This is a set of twenty-five islands, one for each hour of the day plus a mysterious extra island. This is no mere figure of speech: each island sits in a certain block of time, so the noon island is always in bright sunshine, while others under different states of night, day or twilight.

The ruler of the midnight island, Christopher Carrion, has a sinister agenda that involves bringing night to all the Arabat. His opponent, Rojo Pixler, is no good guy either, but is a relentless capitalist intent on a monopoly on all magic and converting the whole world (and Candy's world, known to the locals as the Hereafter) into his own marketplace. In the middle is Candy who has adventures as she goes from place-to-place as both Carrion and Pixler seek her, aware that she is something special.

Abarat is not a self-contained novel, but the first in a series (which I believe to date has only one other book published). As such, it is hard to judge the novel on its plot, which is obviously incomplete. Barker does do a good job at creating a truly bizarre world, one that at times is almost too bizarre. With humor, drama and danger throughout the book, this is a nice read, even if it not a perfect one. For Harry Potter fans who are looking for something new (but at the same time not just a pale Potter imitation), this is a good choice.

When I read this book, I had no real idea what to expect. I had never heard of it, but there was a quote from it in another book that I really enjoyed, so I decided to take a chance.

What I got was amazing. The illustrations by the author, Clive Barker, make the sometimes dream-like aspects come alive. Barker has a great handle on how to word passages to make the scenes seem to jump off the page. This was a very good read and I did not want to put it down once I started.

Perhaps my favorite thing was the unpredictability of it all. I have read many, many books, quite a few from this genre, and after a while you begin to be able to predict what will happen. This book contains some surprises though.

Conclusion: if you read it, you will love it.

I needed an imaginative fantasy romp, so I just finished Clive Barker's Abarat. It's sort of The Thief of Always (darkish kid's book) meets Weaveworld (for awesome otherworlds). And the thing that makes this book extraordinarily special: color drawings by Barker interspersed throughout the text. In a fantastical world like Abarat, it's immeasurably cool to see a piece of art depicting, say, a Sea-Skipper, sort of an elegant cross between a human and a sea horse, or a crazy island shaped like a man's pointed head.

The heroine, Candy Quakenbush, has an abusive father and an all-around dreary life in Chickentown, MN (guess what the industry is there?). When she's ripped out of her environment and gets swept away on a sea to the magical islands of Abarat, the joy I felt was similar to the relief I felt when Hagrid showed up to take Harry Potter to his first year at Hogwarts. Candy doesn't get a grace period to adjust, though - the bad guys are after her from the start. She's helped by wonderful creatures on various different islands - called The Hours, as each one is locked in a different time of day - and her sense of adventure and loyalty makes her an exciting heroine.

About 3/4 of the way through, I realized there was no way this book would conclude in a neat little package: there's a sequel on the way. It turns out that this is the first of five planned books (the 2nd is already out, so I'm off to the library for it soon...) This will be a fun story to follow in the coming years.

This is the first children's book I have ever read by Clive Barker. I know that he is much more well known for his works of horror. However, I was very impressed by this book.

I listened to this book on audio book. The audio book was very well done. I think the guy who read the audio book must be the same person who read Stephen King's Dark Tower series on audio book. At least they sound very similar since I keep getting flashbacks to when I listened to the Dark Tower; maybe it is just that Clive Barker and Stephen King have a somewhat similar writing style. The only bad thing about listening to this on audio book is that I missed out on all the neat color pictures. I have the paper version at home so I still got to see the pictures, just not while I was reading the book.

The tone of this book reminded me a lot of Alice in Wonderland and is, initially, a similar premise. Candy Quackenbush lives in Chickentown, MN and, during an assignment for school to write a paper on interesting things in Chickentown (a decidedly uninteresting town), runs into a mystery concerning a man who committed suicide in a hotel room. A strange nautical device is found in the dresser drawer of this hotel room. Candy finds herself obsessing about the symbols on the device. Candy is fed up with her boring life in Chickentown, her beaten down mother, and her abusive father. After a particularly bad scene in class at school, where Candy gets sent to the principals office, Candy decides to just leave school and go walking. She finds herself in a vast prairie outside of Chickentown. While there she runs into an 8 headed man, John Mischief, and ends up helping him to light the lighthouse in the prairie (which Candy thought was an abandoned building). Following some crazy events Candy finds herself swept off to Abarat and swept into a crazy adventure there.

This was a really great book. It is wildly imaginative and full of non-stop action. I loved the way Candy accepted her adventures with ease (since *anything* is better than Chickentown). I also loved the numerous quirky characters that Candy ran into along the way. Candy seems to have a knack for getting people's attention and getting drawn into trouble. There are tons of interesting good and neutral characters in this book. There are also some very interesting villains. The villians in this book are particularly special. There are numerous levels of evil, making you wonder who the *real* villain is. All of the villains have a lot of depth to them, you can see multiple sides to their character. This makes them seem somehow less ultimately evil but more scary and unpredictable.

The description in the book is wonderful. The plotline rolls along gracefully taking Candy from one adventure to the next. Even though many different characters are introduced and interact with Candy, none of it seems forced.

The only disappointment I had with this book was that I thought that the storyline with John Mischeif didn't get much closure; I am sure this storyline will be revisited in the next book. I am also curious as to what is happening back in Chickentown; does Candy's mother know she is missing?

This was a great book. I would read it to slightly older children though since at times it is very violent and it deals with issues of suicide and torture at points. Great book, I am excited to read the next one.

[...]

Clive Barker has done an incredible job in writing this book. This book is more imaginative and fantastic than the Harry Potter series. It has everything from wild fantasy, friendship, love, evil, the typical war between good and evil, fairy tale, deception, drama, comedy, etc. I would have given the book 10 stars if that was possible. It is a book which is not to be missed. It grabs you from the start and it is hard to put down. There were supposed to be a number of books to follow this first one and I think he only came out with one sequel. I hope for the sake of the future generations that Mr. Barker will come out with at least a few more sequels.

I originally read this book back in high school where my naive self was only familiar with Narnia and those wiley devils of the Screwtape Letters. I knew the man could do a twist of fantasy, but Lewis surprised me with this beginning book that could only be called a religious science fiction experience. Two scientists differing in their view on faith are transported to another, close planet to discover it was never how Earth imagined it. Lewis writes much more adult than he did with Narnia and is able to scrape real characters out of everyone. His gift for creating brand new worlds is retained and I was enchanted by the spiritual and secular aspects he put into what could also be simply a great adventure story.

This is one of my favorite C.S. Lewis books, I've read it twice and I still love it,to label it as mere scifi is an insult, it is a terrific book with a unique storyline that explores the nature of humanity and our role in universe. Wonderfully written, just great!

Although I somewhat knew the basic plot of the book before I read it I still found it a pleasant read. Lewis tells a pretty good sci-fi story of a kidnapped man named Ransom finding his way around Malacandra (Mars). The wonder and awe expressed by Ransom in the book is almost worth the read in and of itself. The 'joyful cosmology' of seeing space as the ancients did, calling them the 'heavens' is shown to be superior to the modern notion that space is just cold dead hostile nothingness. This is contrasted with the 'joyless cosmology' of Weston who accepts some half-baked social darwinist philosophy. The aliens were also quite interesting, although I think that Lewis could have done more with the sorns. The hross were cool though.

This was a good start to the trilogy.

A crisply written delving into the Western humanoid psyche. Lewis's unparalleled imagination weaves a thought provoking portrayal of our societal strictures - themes as apropos today as when originally published in 1938.

Elwin Ransom, an Oxford don and an ardent philologist, is enjoying a solitary cross country ramble on his vacation when he encounters Professor Devine, a long-time acquaintance from his student days at Oxford, and Weston, a somewhat distracted and grumpy, reclusive individual. Weston is, in fact, a physicist who has secretly built a space craft in which he and Devine plan to return to Mars (Malacandra, in the native Martian populace's language) with nefarious ideas of plunder and planetary domination. As part of their plan, they drug and kidnap Ransom to take him along as a sacrificial peace offering to the native population.

On the face of it, a beautifully written Out of the Silent Planet has a simple classic sci-fi plot and can certainly be enjoyed at this level. But virtually every reader will recognize that Lewis' work probes far more deeply than that. His strongly held Christian beliefs, never far from that surface plot, are apparent in his criticism of human prejudice and greed. It is also clear that he holds extremely strong views against notions of eugenics and the then universally held belief in the natural supremacy of western white civilization as compared, for example, to aboriginal populations elsewhere in the world. Even though his allegorical tale goes so far as to include a version of angels and an archangel, the story never becomes preachy, odious or whiny.

Astute long-time readers of science fiction are always on the alert for errors of scientific fact. So Lewis may be mildly criticized for making a fundamental error in how gravity would work aboard a space craft but this certainly detracts in no way from the quality of his story. To the contrary, I thought he earned top marks and high praise for crafting, for example, a startlingly accurate description of the appearance of the sky in the transition zone from atmosphere to space at extremely high altitudes (at a time, of course, when space travel was at best a twinkle in scientists' eyes). I also noted a single quite astonishing comment that seemed to predict Einstein's work on cosmology, travel at light speed and relativity ... "But if the movement were faster still ... in the end, the moving thing would be in all places at once." His brief exposition on linguistics and the possibility of a universal syntactical structure of languages was also fascinating without being distracting or pedantic.

For fans of soft sci-fi, Out of the Silent Planet will provide a smorgasbord of delights - alien characters and personalities, philosophy, ethics, survival in a potentially hostile environment and descriptions of alien flora and fauna that are near poetic in their beauty and majesty. I'm looking forward to reading the next novels in his masterwork trilogy, "Voyage to Venus" and "That Hideous Strength".

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

This book is recommended for teens/young adults however I say this book is for the young and old. Great story line and you'll fall in love with the main characters. Enjoy.

The title of the book is Both Sides of Time written by Caroline B. Cooney. I'm 13 years old in the 7th grade. I think people ages 10 and older would read this book. This book is about a girl who's family is torn apart then she went a cewntury back in time just to fall in love and witness a murder. Then, she went back to her original time, figured out the mysterious murder of who really is the murderer and went back in time again, solved the murder and the end of the story is a mystery because the girl either went back to her time or went further back in time. I actually liked this book because it sent emotions crawling through my heart. people should feel that awesome feeling.

To me Both Sides of Time was an excellent read with it relating to everyday life of a teenager going through a conflict of love. Annie's conflict is between her family and friends with the twist of time travel. When she is hurled back one hundred years into the past, she becomes torn between the struggle of her family and boyfriend, and the love of a lifetime.
The situation at home is almost typical for most Americans these days, mother and father getting divorced when one of them has an affair. It's an easy enough situation to relate to that makes the book captivating for most young teens. The love story is played through imperfect timing of events. Annie transfers back and forth from 1895 to 1995 more than once, and while she is in the alternate century time continues to move on. While she is gone her absence creates worry among those at home.
Even though the time travel piece is obviously fiction, the plot of this story has a meaning to it that shows through in some of the most unexpected places. It's not the type of book you would read over and over again. But when it comes to being a romantic novel, I would give it an eight out of ten.

The reality of the situation connects to my life on an almost regular basis, which to me is what makes the difference between a good book and a great book.

Both sides of time is about a young girl who lives in the 1900's but is taken back in time to the 1890's. When she goes back in time she falls in love with a boy and has a romantic relationship with him. But they both have a big problems they can't have a relationship because they live in totally different times. Not only that they both have other people that they once loved.
I really thought this book was very good I enjoyed it a lot. It is actually one of my most favorite books. The author is a great writer she did a wonderful job describing things in the book. You would think it would be hard to understand certain things in the book having it cast in a totally different time but the way the author words things it helps you to understand the book well. Another thing I thought was great about this book is it is not very hard to read actually not hard at all. It was actually fun to read you just always wanted to know what is going to happen next. I never wanted to put the book down. Another great thing about the book is that you learn quite a bit about the 1800's I learned a lot of new things I didn't know. So not only is it fun to read you also learn! One reason I think I liked the book is because it related to me it was about a girl a little bit older than me but I still had things that I could relate with her. I think this book is mainly written for girls because it has quite a bit of romance in it but I guess it wouldn't be too bad if a boy wanted to read it. Not only does the book have some romance it also has mystery and a little suspense to it. The only thing that is kind of bad is at the end. You want to know what is going to happen but that actually that is not a bad thing at all that just means I need to read the sequel!
I would encourage anyone that wants to read a romance story to read Both Sides of Time and hopefully you will enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed it!

I loved this book!! I couldn't put it down! It's a love story with a murder mystery, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat. You don't know what she's going to do ,and keeps you guessing until the very last page! The beginig is kind of slow, but everything picks up after immedeatly. Wish everybody could read it.Wish I could give it more stars than this!!

The Last Command wraps up all of the loose ends that were established in the other two novels in the series. Mara Jade's character is redeemed and from her memorable introduction, to her fight alongside Luke in Myyrkr forest, to her battle with him against C'boath, her character comes full circle and her ties to the Dark Side are finally severed.

Having certain plot points established early on helped when the book took some surprising turns! I was not expecting them and it made this book the most exciting of the three. I have read many of the Expanded Universe Novels and aside from Shadows of the Empire, none of the others come close to this series.

The Star Wars novel franchise is an interesting one, but it holds little interest for me much beyond this time-line in the Star Wars saga. 5 Years after Return of the Jedi is plenty of time to tell a new story about our beloved heroes. But the Expanded Universe has stretched out into 50 or so years after. Honestly these poor characters can't live in peace, because the publishers need to sell more novels. I likely won't be reviewing the other novels as they don't really compare with the ones I've already noted.

I apologize for the derailment, but I just needed to share that with those that may have been following my book reviews on Star Wars. Thanks! This is a wonderful read and all the character's story arcs are resolved in a exciting and logical fashion.

I already had these books but wanted harcover and this one did not have a paper cover on it. just the book!

As post-Return of the Jedi novels about Luke, Han and Leia go, Timothy Zahn's breakthrough Thrawn Trilogy is the best. The author captures the epic spirit of Star Wars space opera overall, but the ultimate hero of climax of this book is NOT Luke or Han or Leia. As long as you're ok with that then you'll probably enjoy this book a lot. I would have given this book 4-stars if not for the let-down ending.

As for the best novels from the era of the movie saga, I recommend all of the following 5-star novels:

Cloak of Deception (Star Wars)
Shadow Hunter (Star Wars: Darth Maul)
Labyrinth of Evil (Star Wars, Episode III Prequel Novel)
Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader (Star Wars)
Shadows of the Empire (Star Wars)

"Just when the Republic thought that the insidious and unfortunately
very clever Thrawn could sink no lower, he does. In other words, send
in the clones!

This gives him the manpower (clonepower?) he needs to crew enough
ships to blow the guts out of lots of the Republic forces and
fortresses.

Han and Chewie must gain aid from a smuggler fleet, to try and stop Thrawn. Luke contends with the evil Jedi Master C'Boath.

Leia, very heavily pregnant, desperately tries to hold things together politically.

In many cases, a reader or viewer of Star Wars can anticipate what will happen in a story before it even starts. One expects the Rebellion/New Republic to be victorious in the end. This does not make the plot any less interesting. One has a vague idea of how the Thrawn Trilogy will end. Still, it is a quality read.

As Thrawn's plan begins to unhatch in "The Last Command", his relationship with Dark Jedi clone C'Baoth begins to crumble. At the same time, the New Republic is pulling allies from sources once thought to be unlikely. The greatest wild card in the story is Mara Jade. If you have not read other Star Wars books that chronologically occur after this book, her fate is a mystery. The author could not have written a more appropriate end to their conflict. Perhaps this is the biggest curve in the story.

As I have expressed in other reviews of Star Wars books, I tend to prefer when the story focuses more on dialogue than on battle scenes. With the exception of the end, this book does not dwell for extended periods in the tedium of describing battle scenes. For myself, this made the book a much quicker read.

Ranking the Thrawn Trilogy in order of preference, I would suggest the second book is best, while this book is the next best. By far, I liked the first book in the series the least. Trends in the reviews seem to follow my opinion to a degree.

Half Magic
By Edward Eager

Re-reading this book has reminded me why Half Magic was always one of my favorite magical adventures. This time I listened to the book on tape.

Half magic begins with the children wondering why they can't ever have a magical adventure like the children in their library books. Their adventure begins with a shiny 'nickel' found in a crack of the sidewalk.

Jane, the oldest thinks that nothing exciting ever happens and wishes for a fire. She only gets a small fire, in a playhouse. Next, their average, un-magical mother picks up the coin to use as bus fare. When she wishes to be home from a boring visit with relatives, she finds herself half-way home.

After the children realize they have a half-magic coin, their adventures become very fun and their planning is much more thought out.
Occasionally Jane, Katherine, Mark and Martha make mistakes in their wishes, which will change history. They also appear and disappear so quickly, their poor mother believes she is losing her mind.

Children and adults will enjoy the magical summer adventures in Half Magic. You may even find yourself re-reading Edward Eager's books many times, as I have.

Jill Ammon Vanderwood,
Author of magical adventures:
Through the Rug
Through The Rug: Follow That Dog (Through the Rug)

Four ordinary children find a magical charm and discover that it grants wishes, but only in halves. Through their wishing and consequent adventures, the children realize the importance of helping others, love for each other, and what true happiness is about.

This is a humorous book that I would recommend to others. It is written in a writing style similar to that of Eleanor Estes, which suites the book well.

Edgar Eager is a master at telling a tale that is not only funny, well-plotted, but has realistic characters. In all his magic books, beginning with Half Magic, he reveals the reason why children grow up to not need magic in the overwhelming way they feel the need for it as small children.

What I will say now will not in any way ruin your delightful experience of any of the books (I remember secreting myself with provisions so that I could finish each one in one sitting). Eager very cleverly shows that magic is really not what children or adults want. What we want is happy endings and adventures--all of the tales have them. Each episode of encountering magic ends up revealing how very dangerous magic can be, since each of the children in each story ends up wishing for things before they've thought the magic's rules through. So there are exciting and unexpected turns of plot in each book.

It may seem like a criticism to say that these books reveal why children reading them can grow up out of magic of this kind. But in fact the gentle, exciting and challenging stories reveal to the children that not ony do good things happen without their help. But the magic challenges them to get involved in taking action themselves. They end up realizing that magic won't really get them everything they hope for, and it often gets them much more than they dreaded! These books reveal why Peter Pan is in the end a pathetic person, since he wants to control life and people to some degree, whereas the children in these books learn that exciting adventures can be found at any time and any place but that when all the magic's done they are understanding that growing up itself is an adventure and there really is "no place like home."

As a child I devoured these. I wish they had reprinted them earlier so my now college graduate sons could have enjoyed them at a younger age. An analogy may be helpful. My sons and I love the "Veggie Tale" stories. If they had been in preschool at the time they first saw them, they would still have loved them. The Veggie Tales came out when they were in high school--but they still loved them and continue to enjoy them with their adult perspective.

Edgar Eager must have been a very gentle, clever and kind man to write the books the way he did. He takes the reader on a wild ride, but leaves him happily on his own doorstep at the end, with the memories of their shared magic adventures. Hope you love them as much as I did...and do! God bless you!

This book was delightful. It was recommended to me by my aunt and I was not disappointed in the least! Funny and inventive. Can't wait to read Eager's other books.

These audio books help children that are having trouble with the written word. I also use them in the car, so each trip we hear more of the story. The kids love them and I think it makes them interested in reading.