Customer Reviews

Adventures on Amelia Island: A Pirate, A Princess, and Buried Treasure (Mom's Choice Awards Recipient)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Our grandchildern loved this story as they enjoy hearing about and
playing pirates.
The book is funny and realistic to children.
Also it is educational in the details without seeming like a history lesson.

Susan in Portland, Ore

What a fun read for elementary and middle school children! We are following the Johnson family as they continue to explore history and local color....this time on Amelia Island. The resources and activities Mrs. Wood offers are excellent for teachers. There are puzzles, word searches, and wonderful discussion questions guaranteed to promote classroom interaction and critical thinking skills. Children can identify with the sibling relationships and family dynamics in each story. The characterizations make one feel as though the children are someone we all know and love!

English teacher Jane R. Wood presents Adventures on Amelia Island: A Pirate, A Princess, and Buried Treasure, an adventure novel for middle school and junior high young adult readers that continues the saga of the Johnson family and their knack for personally experiencing connections with history. When the family spends a week on Amelia Island during the annual Isle of Eight Flags Shrimp Festival, five-year-old Katy learns about a real princess who once lived near there, and encounters a mysterious pirate - is he real, or just a product of her youthful fantasies? Nine-year-old Bobby hunts for the buried treasure of legend supposedly hidden on the island. Bobby and his older brother Joey visit a cemetery, a 19th century fort, and streets reputed to be haunted by ghosts. Black-and-white illustrations intersperse this engaging tale, which draws upon carefully researched history to mesh with the medley of adventure and legend. Also highly recommended is Wood's previous young adult novel, "Voices in St. Augustine".

This book was disappointing to my kids more-so than myself. My son wanted stories about pirates after visiting the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. He got excited about the cover so I bought this one. We had been reading a while when I started to realize that this is not a story about pirates. It's a story about kids learning about pirates while on an "adventure" (meaning on a vacation). Your kids come along by reading about the kids in the story as THEY learn about history.

The picture on the cover as well as the title phrase, "A Prince, A Princess, and Buried Treasure" are nothing more than effective marketing. In my opinion, they are entirely misleading as to the kind of story your child can expect.

While the concept is admirable for parents who want every single thing their children do to be "worthwhile," as a parent who believes that it's okay for some things to be just fun, I found the story intensely boring. More importantly, my son asked if we could skip the rest and read another book because he was completely uninterested.

Mind you, some kids will undoubtedly like this book, especially if they are on a strict diet of educational rather than a balance of educational and fantasy. You just have to know your own kid. As for mine, they still like the cover but they never pull this book from our stack of books-to-read when the time comes to choose another.

This is an excellent children's book. Even though I am not a child nor have
children, I read it. I speak English as a second language and reading
children's books is a great start for me to read in English. The language
used in the book was easy to understand and provided great deal of
vocabulary. I enjoyed reading about Florida's local history that the book's
characters Bobby, Joe and Katy are experiencing by visiting Amelia Island.
I've been to Amelia Island and am pleased to see that author kept the
description historically accurate.