Reading Aloud in 2014 - The 13-Storey Treehouse

 The 13-Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths

 Who wouldn't want to live in a treehouse? Especially a 13-storey treehouse that has a bowling alley, a see-through swimming pool, a tank full of sharks, a library full of comics, a secret underground laboratory, a games room, self-making beds, vines you can swing on, a vegetable vaporiser and a marshmallow machine that follows you around and automatically shoots your favourite flavoured marshmallows into your mouth whenever it discerns you're hungry.
Two new characters – Andy and Terry – live here, make books together, and have a series of completely nutty adventures. Because: ANYTHING can happen in a 13-storey treehouse.
This is a major new series from Andy and Terry- and it's the logical evolution of all their previous books. There are echoes of the Just stories in the Andy and Terry friendship, the breakaway stories in the Bad Book (the Adventures of Super Finger), there's the easy readability of the Cat on the Mat and the Big Fat Cow, and like all these books, the illustrations are as much a part of the story as the story itself.


  My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review by Jack, age 6.5

It was excellent, it was very, very, very good.

It was awesome because it had man-eating sharks and a shark nearly ate Terry. Terry accidently threw Andy's head in the bowling alley. After they ate too many marshmallows they drank too much lemonade from the lemonade fountain.
Their treehouse is awesome because it looked small from the outside but is big on the inside. There was a gorilla and a yellow canary cat with a whole army of yellow canary cats who saved Andy and Terry. They took away the gorilla to a dinosaur island. Terry painted a cat yellow like a yellow canary.
The pictures are really, really, really cool.
Boys and girls should read this book because it is very interesting and very, very cool and awesome.
That's all folks!

Review by Mum, age none-of-your-business

Anything combining the joint talents of Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton is going to be superb. Andy's writing is a pleasure to read aloud with a deceptively simple style that is never condescending, extremely visual and uses a vocabulary that doesn't require stopping frequently to explain words or phrases. Terry's illustrations complement and enhance the text perfectly, and are chock full of unexpected details.

My favourite part of the book was the illustrations of the pages - pages within pages - especially the one that has a page within a page within a page.... (pg 228). We had made a movie like this several days before reading this book, so it was of particular interest to both of us.

To get the most out of this book find a kid aged between 5 and 10, share it aloud and be prepared to giggle. We are off to find the next book in the series.