Collateral Bloggage What passes for thought around here…

Fiction Friday: The Indian in the Cupboard

I’ve been really enjoying some of the read-alouds I’ve done with Ethan this year.  Ethan’s also taken to reading quite a bit more than we might’ve suspected not so long ago, and I’m sure all the reading I’ve done to him hasn’t hurt at all.

I don’t count everything I read to Ethan on my Book List.  It generally has to be over a hundred pages, at least, and not be overly large print.

The Indian in the Cupboard, by Lynne Reid Banks, is one I’ll count.  And since it’s a book I had first experienced as a read-aloud to me, I guess I’m paying it forward.

And since Ethan is standing next to me as I write this (we’re watching the MLB Playoffs…check here for Ethan’s Postseason Picks on Monday), I thought I’d ask him to chip in on the review.

His initial contribution: “I thought it was better than awesome.”

I thought that would be that, but then he found his Reviewer Voice.  The floodgates were loosed.  And here’s the rest of his review/recap:

In the book, Omri the kid had a cupboard that was magical but he had to have a key with a red ribbon on it to make the magic work.  Once he put Little Bear the Indian inside the cupboard --- he wasn’t alive yet, he was just plastic --- he closed and locked the cupboard.

When he went to sleep, he heard a little noise inside the cupboard.  It was Little Bear the Indian --- he was alive!  He wasn’t plastic any more.  He had a little knife and he stabbed him in the finger.  Only a tiny bit of blood came out.

Omri could not understand his voice because he WAS SO TINY!!!  A couple of days later, he said something funny:  “You bring bark of tree.  Little Bear make longhouse!”

One of Omri’s friends, Patrick, wanted to have a toy alive.  He choosed a cowboy named Boone.  Patrick wanted Little Bear and Patrick to feed at lunchtime.  Then, a girl pushed Patrick off his seat, and he almost fell on Little Bear and Boone.

Omri and Little Bear went to the store where plastic figures were, because Little Bear wanted a wife.  They bought an Indian girl…lady actually.  When they got home, they couldn’t find the cupboard, because Omri’s brother put it in the attic.  They got the cupboard, but they couldn’t find the key.

So, they asked his brother where it was, and he said that he didn’t notice it.  So they looked and looked and looked, but they couldn’t find it anywhere.

That night, they thought it was under the carpet, and there was a rat under the carpet.  Omri sent Little Bear down under the carpet to find the key, and the rat had not eaten for twenty-five hours.  When Little Bear came back, he had the key.  Then, the rat was in the carpet where they could see it, so they put the carpet they had torn off back in place.

Boone and his horse and Little Bear and his wife, named Bright Stars, well a little before this, Little Bear had got a horse, and they sat on their horses, and Omri put them back in the cupboard and turned them back to plastic.

The next book is called The Return of the Indian.  Thank you and goodbye.

So, that’s the eight-year-old perspective on the book.

Ethan failed to mention the unfortunate incident which made the search for the key so urgent, that being Little Bear’s rashly shooting Boone with an arrow (Omri wanted to bring an Army Medic to life to tend to Boone).  He also forgot that Little Bear and Boone became blood brothers before they went back to their own times.

Boy, this saved me a lot of thinking, if not a lot of typing.  But it was excellent touch-typing practice.  I’ll see if I can get Ethan to be a little less verbose next time, but I’m proud of how much he remembered.

We’ll probably eventually pick up more of the books in the series.  I didn’t even realize there were any others (there are five total).  But next up for read-aloud is Naya Nuki: Shoshoni Girl Who Ran.