We have a joke between the three of us about reading ahead when the others aren't there. What I love is that Wesley is trying to do that too. I often find him sneaking into my room to pick up the book to try to figure out what's going to happen next. On his own, this book is way above his reading level, but he uses the pictures and tries to read the chapter titles to figure out what's going to happen. I just love that. It's getting him passionate about reading and that's what I want. He hasn't always shown a lot of interest in reading, so seeing him this excited is fun for me.
This story focuses less on the Pevensie family (they're very minor characters in this one) and more on Shasta, a young slave boy who runs away with his horse to prevent being sold to a crueler master than the one he's had. He lives in the land of Calormen, near Narnia, and he and the new master's horse (a Narnian talking horse who had been captured by Calormenes) decide to try to get to Narnia together. They meet lots of interesting people and have some amazing adventures along the way. Shasta discovers his true identity and a future he never imagined.
While we loved this story, the language in this book was a bit more challenging for the kids than in the two previous books. There are a lot of queens and kings who speak in very formal, old fashioned ways and the kids had some trouble understanding that. We often had to stop so I could summarize what had been said, or to define some words for them. So we felt like this one took us a bit longer to get through than the others. But once they understood what was happening, they loved each scene and all the fun characters.
Prince Caspian, here we come! We watched the movie this weekend, so now we're ready to see how much better the book is.
No comments:
Post a Comment