I’ve recently finish a book called The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. If I had to rate this book on a scale from 1 to 10, I’d rate 10 out of the possible 10. I’ve quite enjoyed this book and I feel as though it appeals to a broad audience of young readers which is very important.

To summarize this story,

This book is about an orphan named Reynie who partakes in an adventure for a man by the name of Mr. Benedict. He and his friends Kate Wetherall, Sticky Washington, and Constance Contraire are sent on a mission for Mr. Benedict to a school called The Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened. They go through interesting obstacles, such as making an enemy of Martina Crowe and getting past Jackson and Jillson, the executives. The children discover that Ledroptha Curtain, (the head of school), is sending dangerous messages in his machine called The Whisperer. Finally, as a team they destroy The Whisperer once and for all.

My favorite character in this book is Constance Contraire. I think her crankiness is one of the many things that kept the story interesting. If they made a movie out of this book I’d love to see what they made of her.

Out of all the books I’ve read, I’d definitely say this book is in my top 10. I can wait to read the second one. 

Ms. Schlitz’s book is a book of monologues and dialogues of children from medieval times. These children are suppose to be between the ages of 10 and 15. There are royals and servants and some of the people know each other and interact.

When I met Ms. Schlitz she told me how she felt went she received a phone call that told her that she had won. She currently works at the Park School in Maryland where my cousin goes to school. She told me that it she was so surprised when she got the phone call and she told me she thought it wasn’t real.

I enjoyed Ms. Schlitz’s book and I think her book really deserved that award.

Since my teacher was on the Newbery commitee she had my class all read a monologues and dialogues from the book. Here is my podcast as Isobel the Lord’s Daughter.

Enjoy!

One thing I thought took away from the play was the added songs. Shakespeare original wrote it to make it dramatic and I thought that the songs make it seem unshakespearean.

Everyone must have worked really hard and it showed.

I think this book is a great example of historical fiction because of the research Karen Heese did about the time this story took place.

Karen Heese uses a lot of simile and some alliteration. For example on page 67 she writes, “There’s a fruit called a banana colored yellow like a June sun and curved.” Then on page 68 she writes, “Belgian Chocolate. It’s like biting into a corner of heaven.”

An example of the alliteration is “Nathan hid under a sack of burlap bags, one boxcar away from me.” (Page 6)

Karen Heese must have done a lot of research on the diseases typhus and ringworm considering that typhus was very common then. I did some research and found out that nearly three million deaths in Russia occurred because of typhus and more occurred in Poland. These were places where the story occurred and the typhus was caught by Rifka and her family.

I also found out a way to treat ringworm was to use tea tree oil. My guess is when she was getting her treatment her head was being washed with soap that had tea tree oil in it.

I think you should definitely read this book.

I found out that they did all their writing about what they were learning in school. I learned something very important that was from c15hu’s mistakes. You have to proofread. You can also use pictures sometimes to make things stick out. They wrote very detailed posts every time they wrote, (which was about every week and a half.) They got a lot of comments from other students and also other teachers. My favorite post was 4th Graders on the use of a word in The Higher Power of Lucky. This was my favorite post because this letter is addressed to the Editor of the New York Times, meaning that c15hu is trying to stand up for something they believed in. Something that I can use from this for the rest of my blog is to work really hard to make this and many other posts very interesting as c15hu has done well.