What do You think about The Magic Faraway Tree (2002)?
The book is based on the adventures of three children, Jo, Beth and Fanny who have recently moved to a house that has an enchanted wood at the bottom of the garden. Within this wood, is a tree unlike all the others, where strange people live such as a man with a face as round as a moon and a man who only wears saucepans. The tree also has another secret, at the very top, a new land appears each day where the children and their new friends get to explore each time. Likes:What is not to like with a story from Enid Blyton, especially from the first book in the series of the adventures of the faraway tree. I remember the first time I read this story, my mum gave me her old copy when I was 9. At the time (and I secretly still do) I felt that this book was the best present in the world and made me want to make up my own stories about faraway lands. I enjoy the way the story develops with the children first discovering the faraway tree and finding out that there are people living in a tree. To the different lands that visit the tree on a daily basis and the new characters/worlds that are introduced to keep the story fresh and moving along at a good pace. I really like the way Enid Blyton imagination has run wild in this story but it all fits nicely and makes sense. With all the different lands that visit the tree each day, the reader will never get bored from hearing about the three children's adventures. Age range: I would recommend the book for children that are of 9 and upwards.To be used in a classroom: For children to either read this book as part of a paired reading activity, or an activity could be created for book week, where the class reads this book and produce either their own adventure with their friends up at the top of the faraway tree in a story they had written.
—Ben Phillips
I really enjoyed reading The Enchanted Wood, The Magic Faraway Tree and The Folk of The Faraway Tree. It has funny characters like Moon-Face, Saucepan Man and Silky the Fairy. Saucepan Man is always wearing saucepans and kettles. He's a bit deaf because of his saucepans and kettles banging together. He's very funny! Moon-Face has a round face like the moon. He has a slippery-slip inside his house. Silky is a very, very, very nice fairy. Bessie and Franny move next door to an Enchanted wood, and find the Faraway Tree with its many different places.In The Magic Faraway Tree, Jo, Bessie and Franny take their cousin Rick on an adventure he'll never forget! But then the tree starts dying and nobody knows what's happening! I found these books really funny and exciting. They are fun books to read and make me laugh. These books always have magic in them!I think this book would be brilliant for lower ks2, and it will help to inspire their imagination and creative writing.
—Lori Watts
When I was a young girl in primary school out teacher used to sit us down in our reading groups and pop a basket of books on the table. Next would come a set of headphones which was attached to a tape recorder. For the next 15 minutes or so we were fully immersed in the magical world of talking trees, swimming turtles or Emperors trying to find their clothes. Next to Art, Reading was, and is, a favourite past time.Over the years there have been many authors that captured my young mind - Margaret Mahy, Dr Seuss and Roald Dahl. As I got older I became hooked on Ann M. Martin's young girls world of The Baby Sitter Club; the deliciously horrifying realm of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps and enthralled by the talented creator of Where's Wally? - also known as Where's Waldo? in America - Martin Handford. However none could measure up to my all time favourite child book writer like Enid Blyton In the pages of her books I visited fantastic realms filled with wonder, embarked on exciting quests with strange new friends and found how intoxicating it is to truly let your imagination run free. I had roped in my younger brother, the neighbors cats and our toys to help reenact my favorite scenes. I even went through a stage where everything in my room needed to have a rounded edge like the room Moonface lived in. Suffice to say my parents wouldn't indulge this particular quirk. But they allowed me to hang all manner of yellow moons and decorate as many surfaces with as much red and white material as I could lay my greedy hands on.It's because of this kind of nostalgia that I picked up this book. Twenty-eight years later I feared my adult view would warp it into some childish fantasy that best lay in the past. Admittedly for the first few chapters I bulked because of the innocence it portrays. However after a while I began to remember. The things that came to mind sparked a moment of complete and utter surrender as flashes of my childhood came to the fore. I could feel the sun on my skin while swimming in the river that ran along the edges of town; eating tart plums in the tree because we were too eager to wait for them to ripen; playing target board against the boys just prove that girls were better and watching my mum make feijoa preserves. But the one thing I remember more clearly than anything else was the milkman. He was an old man in his sixties or seventies with crazy, wire like white hair. The most impressive thing about him was his thick set of eyebrows. To my childs eye I used to think it was funny that he could lift his eyelids because the hair on his eyebrow looked too heavy. However it wasn't the so much the man that I thought of initially but this - It's for this reason that I give this a 5 star rating. The Magic Faraway Tree helped me remember a place and time where everything was new and exciting. It gave a glimpse of how it felt to walk unfettered by the concerns of the adult world. A memory where my dreams were truths and laughter had a pure meaning. I hope if you ever choose to return to your childhood classic that you too have wondrous tales that pour forth.LB
—LastBreath
