Mom & Son Book Club #10: The Ark, the Reed, and the Fire Cloud

The Ark, the Reed, & the Fire Cloud

by Jenny Cote
448 pages
(review by kiddo)

I received this book from the publisher and have really enjoyed reading it to kiddo. I'll let kiddo do his review first (with my comments in italics, as usual) and post mine later in the day(update: here's the link to mine). Kiddo's review comes with a spoiler warning though - he gives lots of things away in his answers.

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1. Did you like this book? I liked it except for two parts. Why did you like it? Because it had lots of exciting parts and lots of "what's gonna happen next?! what's gonna happen next?!" - those kind of parts. Ah, suspense - its like a drug to us book addicts!

2. What was your favorite part? All of it except for two parts. Any thing specific? Oh yeah! When Max was fighting the snake and when the four animals got eternal life.

3. What was your least favorite part? When they had to leave Gillamon and when we found out that Charlie was bad.

4. What did you think of the illustrations? The pictures were ok. The frog singing was not so good but the one with Henriette is good. I'd like the pictures better if they had color. I was going to - if you say ok - I was going to color in some of the pictures. No kiddo, I'm sorry, you can't color in books. I'm such a mean mom, I know. Do you think the book needed more pictures or did you do ok with imagining things? I did ok imagining but most of the animals, since I didn't know what they looked like, it was hard to imagine them. Actually, I think kiddo did really well with this. Often when I was reading and I thought things might be a bit confusing, I'd tell him to close his eyes and imagine what was happening. I'd read one sentence at a time then ask it he could "see" it. Sometimes he could and other times he needed some additional explanations. But always, when he opened his eyes, I could see the excitement, the light that went off - he "saw" it happening in his head. It was so cool to watch!

5. Would you recommend this book to your friends? YES. As long as they read it quickly. Why? Because if they didn't read it quickly they might forget what happens or they might lose the book. Did we read it quickly? Kind of, except for parts. We started it then stopped then started another book then came back to it. Um, yeah, kiddo's sense of time is a bit off here. We started this book way back in October and we finally finished it earlier this week. But I will say that the story did not drag nor did we put it aside because we tired of it. It took so long simply because we read only 1 or 2 chapters every couple days. And we only picked up another book because kiddo got WIZARDOLOGY for his birthday and really wanted to read it. And for the record, kiddo didn't forget anything that happened in this book..

6. Is there anything else you'd like to say about this book? These are the animals I liked: Max, Gillamon, Kate, Al, Liz, Jaques, Georgio, and Don Pedro. And these are the people I liked Noah, Shem, Japeth (kind of) and Ham (kind of), and out of the girls, Noah's wife and Shem's wife. Japeth's wife and Ham's wife were ok. What did you think about the author adding to the story in the Bible? I liked that. Do you think it's ok to add to the Bible story when the Bible story doesn't give you the details? YES. In fact, I might add something to it. What would you add? Well, I'd like to have the story of Jesus when he died on the cross with Max and Liz and Kate and Al and Gillamon and God speaking would be in it as well.

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Kiddo also wanted to send an email to the author, Jenny Cote. He thinks that since I get signed books from authors and that some authors comment on my blog, I can talk to any author I want whenever I want. I wish! But anyway, here's kiddo's message to Ms. Cote: The book was a very nice book. I would love to read it again and get the new book that you are writing, The Dreamer, The Schemer and The Robe. I'm happy to help you make more stories when you are ready.

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I hope you'll come back later today for my review. There are lots of things I'd like to discuss about this book!