Customer Reviews

Davy Crockett: A Life on the Frontier (Ready-To-Read:)

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

 

 

Honestly, our favorite thing about this book is the cover illustration. We love that coonskin cap.

This book combines legends with biography in a way that is hard for early readers to connect to. Each chapter begins with a Paul-Bunyan-like legend about Davy, in italicized type, and then zips into the real biography. However, for a first-grader reading the story, that is totally confusing. It is a style more geared toward a fourth-or-fifth grader, the swooping back and forth between dreamworld and reality.

The parts about Davy being a warrior and a crack shot and a legislator and finally fighting at the Alamo (the BIOGRAPHICAL parts), were interesting and historical and well-written. But since they were interrupted with the mythic Davy, the book left me turned off. I'm a fan of poetic language and myth, but an early reader is still learning.

Other books in this series and at this level that we have really liked:

1)Harriet Tubman and the Freedom Train

2)Taking Flight - the Story of the Wright Brothers

I don't know why we think it is our responsibility to have this kind of reading available when the grandkids come around, but they have come to expect to find it on our coffee table, and we enjoy reading it ourselves when nobody is looking. Stories like Davy's are so timeless and so completely American that we always feel good when we put it down.

Davy Crockett is the best of the ready to read biographies that I've read. It truly is good and very interesting. If only more of the books were written as good as this one is!