The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

This month, the Book Club read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (adapted by Malvina G. Vogel with illustrations by Brendan Lynch). There were three separate short stories in this volume: The Red-Headed League, The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.

Unfortunately, our group found several problems with this book. First of all, it should be mentioned that everyone agreed that the book was too easy to read for our group's age bracket. There were too many pictures and not enough words...these kids want to READ! Other issues with the book can be summed up in some of the comments made:

Nick: "It was too British...I didn't like Sherlock because he was too annoying."

Ben: "Sherlock was too full of himself. He brags a lot and he is too nerdy."

Liam: "The plots of the stories were too revised."

However, there were some positive comments about the book:

Cameron: "The stories were awesome because they had snakes...Sherlock and Watson didn't know what was going to happpen but I did!"

Liam: "I liked that they solved mysteries."

Alas, this was not one of the better reviewed books that our club has read. Here's hoping that next month's book, My Life as a Book, fares better!

Toward the end of the discussion, Miss Lisa handed out materials that were adapted from a Scholastic, Inc. exercise. These worksheets highlighted the "Ingredients for a Mystery" and the steps to "Planning Your Mystery" through determining the Setting, the Problem, the Suspects, the Detective, the Clues, and a Sequence of Events. These worksheets are a great way to get kids to write their own stories.

Please check back soon for the submitted mysteries, written by our very own Book Club authors!

The Giant-Slayer

In March, the Book Club read The Giant-Slayer by Iain Lawrence. This tale, set in 1950's Massachusetts in the midst of the polio epidemic sweeping America, works on multiple levels. It is a historical fiction account of a specific time and place in history, with characters either battling polio or worried that they might get the disease. The main protagonist, Laurie Valentine, spends much of her time on the polio ward, visiting her sick friend. It is there that she meets the other patients in their iron lungs and begins to weave a magical story of a tiny boy (not young, but tiny) who sets off to slay a giant in order to gain acceptance. The back and forth narration, between the 1950's and a time long ago, keeps readers on their toes, drawing similarities between the past and present, and between their lives and those characters in Laurie's tale.

As a group, we found this book to be well-written but too confusing for the grade levels we cover. The whole idea of polio is foreign to the group and much time was spent in discussing polio itself and the iron lung "treatment." The jumping back and forth between stories was also a little too complex. We'll wait and try to re-read this in a couple of years as the adults who read it just raved about the book!