Customer Reviews

Beck Beyond the Sea (Disney Fairies)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Young girls with vivid imaginations, or just a fondness for animals, will love this charming adventure. Thirty-two delicate watercolor illustrations help raise it to a level above the typical storybook. Teaching a gentle lesson about shame, it focuses on Beck, a curious fairy with a special talent for talking with wildlife.

Beck's job is to take care of Mother Dove, the source of all goodness in Pixie Hollow. Beck wants to explore all of Never Land, beyond where fairies roam. But how to fly there? Her fairy wings won't take her far enough. She tries wing extenders, then a tiny sleigh, but neither work. Finally, some special fairy dust from sneaky fairy Vidia does the trick.

Traveling with the brilliant Explorer Birds, Beck's adventures include dodging flying ice, being plucked out of ocean by a seagull and riding aboard a rabbit and a fox.

Back home, Beck learns to her shame that, since she left Mother Dove unprotected, Vidia stole her magical feathers! With a little help from the animals, Vidia gets her comeuppance and Mother Dove forgives her.

The quality presentation includes a lovely cover portrait of Beck that's complete with sparkles on her wings. The book's reading level is 2.7.

In my opinion, the best Disney Fairy books are those that have the conflict growing out of the fairy "talents". (The talents are both gifts and curses.)

Here, Beck's fascination with animals (she is an animal talent) leads her into an interest in exploring, and eventually to Vidia for advice.

It is too bad Vidia is usually being portrayed as the "bad girl". Her "speed talent" has become a "speed addiction" so she tends to break rules and disregard everything else as pointless. Her independent streak is her strength, but also her weakness because she is ALWAYS alienated from the "group"

I was excited at first when Vidia and Beck started talking because they would make a POWERFUL adventuring team! But no,... Beck is instead portrayed as not too bright and Vidia goes back to being an outcast.

Too bad.

I received this order promptly and the book was in great condition. I purchased it for an elementary school in our area. It has been checked out on a regular basis, the kids love the book and would love more like it.

This book was about Beck, an animal talent fairy who's job it is to take care of Mother Dove. She got inspired to travel to the world beyond fairy hollow and the first portion of the book deals with her trying to figure out a way to endure the travel since her fairy dust will most likely run out before she can complete her trip. The obvious answer would have been for her to put in a special request to Queen Ri or something but then we wouldn't have a story. Anyway, after a few mishaps she meets Vidia who gives her some super-strong fairy dust and she's on her way.

her adventures were waaaay too short. I loved the concept of the explorer birds and the striped sea and the desert with the sand that talks but I wish Beck had spent more time exploring, I was real disappointed in how rushed it was.

I hated how Vidia ended up being the bad guy too since she's one of my favorite fairies. but overall this is one of the best fairy books in the series! definitely in my top 3!

I love these books because they help give more about Tinkerbell, my all time favorite disney character. You have to have an open mind when reading these books, as they are a whole different side of what we have come to know about this little sassy fairy. But my niece and I love to read them together, and these books have helped us create a stronger, more unique bond.

We own all of this series! Started reading them when my daughter was 4 (she just turned 5 now), and they are age appropriate. Not too scary and always a happy ending. One book only takes us about 4-5 nights worth of reading together. The longer ones are good too "Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg" and "Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand", but they are a little bit scarrier than the short books (more appropriate for ages 5-7 I would think).

I bought this book on a whim - and my 4 1/2 year old daughter loves it! I thought she might be too young, but she followed along well. We read two chapters a night and finished it in 5 days. We'll be buying more, as I'm getting tired of reading the picture books :-)

This is the fourth Disney Fairies book I've read to my 3 1/2 y/o daughter. She just loves the fairy adventures and learning their names and their talents. When she's older I'm sure she'll enjoy reading them on her own but; for now we read it together. I'm so happy to have discovered these wonderful stories. This book by far has been our favorite adventure. Beck is an Animal Talent fairy which is very Dr Doolittle and brings so much more to a story. She learns alot about life beyond Pixie Hollow and discovers to trust herself and believe in her dreams. So much of Beck's adventure can be translated to any adversities anyone faces in life. I'm sure it's a story we'll discuss for a long time. You won't be dissappointed.

These chapter books are terrific, got them for our 13yr. old Grandaughter, she LOVES them!!
Thanks for a GREAT book!!!

"Beck Beyond The Sea"
Written by Kirsten Larsen; Illustrated by Denise Shimabukuro
(Disney/Random House, 2007)
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This is one of the more engaging books in Disney's Tinker Bell-related Pixie Hollow series, albeit one with an interesting subtext. Beck, an "animal-talent" fairy with a close connection to the mystical creature called Mother Dove, who is the font of magic in the fairyland called Pixie Hollow. Beck is also restless and dreams of seeing the wide world outside, and tries various means to become able to fly with the migrating birds who fly across the seas. Each of her experiments fails, and she is gulled into trusting bad-girl fairy Vidia, who gives her a way to fly farther and faster than any other fairy -- an illegal supply of super-duper fairy dust, which Vidia made from feathers that were plucked from Mother Dove herself. Beck resists, but is ultimately too tempted by her own desires, and when she finally uses the dust, she is propelled into the most exciting journey of her life.

The anti-drug message is unmistakable, although curiously mixed. Beck (and more to the point, Vidia) get into trouble in the end for using the illicit fairy dust, and yet Beck does have a liberating, life-enriching experience which she does not seem to regret. Beck is made less culpable because she returns as a hero, helping catch Vidia in the act of stealing more feathers -- and yet her use of the illicit powder itself is not clearly condemned. Who knew the folks at Disney had this much moral relativism in them? At any rate, this is also one of the more fun and imaginative Pixie Hollow books -- Beck's journey to foreign lands is exciting and evocative, and this makes for one of the strongest narratives in the series. Definitely worth checking out if you're into the other books! (Joe Sixpack, ReadThatAgain children's book reviews)