Deck the Halls and Read These Books

The Wee Free Men By: Terry Pratchett
Fiction- youth, fantasy 263 pages, 5th grade reading level copyright 2003

This book has nothing to do with Christmas; however, we will be giving it out as a Christmas present to someone that does not read our blog and so we read it to see if it was something that we wanted to give. And as others might be in the same predictiment that we were we thought we would share with you. First, we got the names of some cousins in the family Christmas name exchange that were rabid Harry Potter fans and as such have been branching out into other fantasy books now that they have nothing more to read about Potter. They are also in high school and good readers, so we wanted to get something not too babyish for them, but didn’t want to randomly pick out some adult novel that was full of sex and/or gore as sometimes happens in fantasy books. (As we don’t want to deal with their mom when mad, it is not pretty!) We asked a friend into fantasy books for some ideas and they mentioned that we might like to try a Terry Pratchett novel. Looking on-line we saw this series of children’s books that he wrote, where this was the first in the series. According to the reviews by others it was interesting even to adults, but as the main character is only 9 we were worried that it would be too childish. We are happy to report that it is not too childish. There is only one time that it is mentioned that the main character is 9 and without that one could easily think that she is in her early teens. The story is fun with fun characters like the wee free men who are blue, tattooed covered little men in kilts, who escaped from fairyland. It also has a nice storyline in that Tiffany, the main character, must risk her life to save her little brother, even though, like most girls with little brothers, she doesn’t really like him. (He is always sticky and yelling that he needs to use the bathroom.) All in all, we wouldn’t mind reading more of this series, even if it is for kids.