Friday, May 16, 2008

Prequel Mania

Since I know some of you are fans, I just thought I'd mention Once Upon a Time in the North the Pullman prequel to the Compass stories. It's sort of an adventure with our wily balloonist, Lee Scoresby and Iorek, a certain armoured bear. J. is enjoying it, I may not get to it this go-round from the library!

Then, I heard about Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson. It seems to be getting ok reviews, and has been issued/written in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Anne Books. I haven't reserved it yet at the library (a surprise there!), because I'm a bit ambivalent about reading more in depth about Anne's hard luck life before she got off the train and met Matthew.

5 comments:

julienj said...

I definitely need to re-read the Pullman trilogy; maybe this would be a good time (in the spirit of the annual re-reading of favorites!), and then I can read the prequel, too.

I just read the third of the Dave Barry/Ridley Pearson prequels of Peter Pan. They were quite fun and offered good explanations of the events, names, etc. that are canonical in PP. If I were a PP junkie, though, I suppose I might have felt differently, because the books are so far removed from the (rather stuffy) tone of the original (not that I read the whole thing; it was too stuffy).

Confession: I've never read Anne of Green Gables.

holdenj said...

!!!

julienj said...

I put it on my Goodreads to-read list!

crossons said...

Never read Anne of Green Gables? Egad! OK, so I didn't read them until I was an adult.... but time to reread, I think. I tried to get M to read/listen to them, no luck.

JJ, on the other hand, has listened to PP a number of times. He tried to read it - but, not surprisingly, found it tough going. I've seen the Dave Barry books - are they ok for an 8 year old? It would be great for him to have these to read, especially if they are a bit more contemporary. The original PP is a bit violent and, well, surprise, racist.

julienj said...

Alex loved them, and there was nothing objectionable in them. Some slapstick and peril, but the short chapters make things fly by so the scary parts are not so scary, at least in the first book. Lord Ombra in the second book is super creepy, though, so you might want to take a look at it first before handing it to JJ.