Mini- Me Reads - The 13-Story Treehouse

This week I am super excited to be featuring a really fun book that I got from Macmillan here on Mini-Me Reads.  I know this meme has kind of fallen to the wayside in the last little while but I got a whole bunch of children's and middle grade books so it will slowly be coming back!

TITLE The 13-Story Treehouse
AUTHOR Andy Griffiths, Terry Denton
PUBLICATION April 16th 2013 by Feiwel & Friends
READ May 23, 2013
SOURCE From Macmillan for review

Who wouldn't want to live in a treehouse? Especially a 13-storey treehouse that has a bowling alley, a see-through swimming pool, a tank full of sharks, a library full of comics, a secret underground laboratory, a games room, self-making beds, vines you can swing on, a vegetable vaporiser and a marshmallow machine that follows you around and automatically shoots your favourite flavoured marshmallows into your mouth whenever it discerns you're hungry.

Two new characters – Andy and Terry – live here, make books together, and have a series of completely nutty adventures. Because: ANYTHING can happen in a 13-storey treehouse.

This is a major new series from Andy and Terry- and it's the logical evolution of all their previous books. There are echoes of the Just stories in the Andy and Terry friendship, the breakaway stories in the Bad Book (the Adventures of Super Finger), there's the easy readability of the Cat on the Mat and the Big Fat Cow, and like all these books, the illustrations are as much a part of the story as the story itself.

On an afternoon when I was incredibly tired and just had no drive to pick up the next novel in my reading pile, I decided I needed a light read and picked this one up. It was just what I needed at the time! This was wildly funny and reading it just didn’t take much thought at all. I breezed through it in about a half an hour (which made me feel like I accomplished something huge on an otherwise unproductive day, so brownie points there) and had so much fun in the process.

Andy and Terry live in the most kick-butt treehouse ever thought up. I mean, this place is complete with a bowling alley, full bathroom, underground laboratory and even a shark tank. With the pressure of their publisher on their backs to finish their next novel, Andy and Terry are trying to buckle down and get their work done but there are just distractions everywhere. As you can tell, there isn’t a whole bunch of realism here, it’s an escapism tale and brings the laughs.

Terry & Andy are pretty much opposites of each other. While Andy is much more goal oriented and spends much of the novel simply going along with Terry so he can finally get him settled down to work, Terry is just everywhere. This guy had the attention span of a fish! He could not sit down and concentrate on anything. I had hoped that there would be a message there about how in life it is important to buckle down at times and get the task at hand done, but it ended up that Terry's zaniness payed off and helped the cause.

The illustrations are rich and plentiful. Some pages didn’t even have words and just featured funny comic strip like doodles for the reader to zoom through. I actually found myself staring at the pictures for much longer than I spent really reading the novel. Upon finishing my 5 year old daughter came up and flipped through the book while I described the story for her and I basically ended up reading it twice. The second time around she laughed even harder than I had.

There isn’t much of a lesson to be learned here but I did enjoy watching Andy and Terry get up to random shenanigans and realize that the best stories come from every day life. From flying catnaries to gorillas hunting oversized bananas and sea monsters disguised as gorgeous mermaids this hilarious middle grade novel holds nothing back and it pays off in the end. This is middle grade for a younger audience, I would say 5-10, and it’s perfect for exactly who it is aimed at. I think this is one that my kids and I will be reading a few times in the future.