APA Reference: Osborne, Mary Pope. (2010). Magic treehouse #24: earthquake in the early morning. New York, NY: Random House LLC.
Impressions: This was my first time to read this series and I loved the concept. Traveling back in time on a quest to help Merlin and Morgan la Fay while learning about history. This is a perfect mix of fiction and fact for early readers. I was a bit confused about who Morgan was and about the writings they had to find. After further research on the series I've found that you need to read them in order to fully understand. As a reader who knows how to monitor my comprehension I felt that it was ok for me to not go back and reread all of the series and still be able to comprehend the text. I'm not sure that a younger reader would know that some of the things mentioned in the book are from other books within the series. I think they would not know what is going on and just skip on over it and keep going.
Professional Review: The year is 1906, the place is San Francisco. Annie and her brother, Jack, have just traveled here in their magic tree house, on a mission from Morgan le Fay, the mysterious magical librarian from King Arthur's time. In an effort to save Camelot, the children have already found three special kinds of writing for Morgan's library: something to follow (Civil War on Sunday), something to send (Revolutionary War on Wednesday), and something to learn (Twister on Tuesday). Now it's time to find "something to lend." It's a quiet, peaceful morning in San Francisco, and Annie is eager to start exploring. So eager, in fact, that she pulls Jack away from his research just before he would have learned a very important piece of information... All too soon, the siblings figure it out for themselves: they have arrived in this lovely city a moment before one of the biggest earthquakes the U.S. has ever known shakes the Bay Area to pieces! Stunned, Jack and Annie wander the streets, but quickly find a purpose. Lots of people need help transporting goods to safety, and many more are left without any idea where to go or what to do. But what about their mission? Will the kids find something to lend before the entire city goes up in flames?
Mary Pope Osborne's tremendously popular Magic Tree House series offers young readers a chance to immerse themselves in spellbinding adventures even as they learn about history. The terrible San Francisco earthquake is described with great historical accuracy, but with admirable age-appropriateness. (Ages 5 to 8) --Emilie Coulter
Coulter, Emilie. [Review of the book Earthquake in the early morning]. Amazon.com Review. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Tree-House-24-Earthquake-ebook/dp/B003QMLI28/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431127677&sr=1-1&keywords=magic+tree+house+earthquake+in+the+early+morning
Library Uses: This would be a great series to do a book club with early readers. It would be interesting to have several groups reading several different titles and then come back together as a whole group to discuss what they have in common and what is different as well as the facts they learned.
