Grades 1-5
What’s bored 13th century royalty to do? If you’re the Earl of Daftwood, you throw a party complete with a grand feast and jousting. And if you’re the Earl of Daftwood’s staff (steward, herald, cook, cleaning servant, farmer, knight, squire etc), you groan and fret because nothing is more troublesome than a party.
Using various rhyming schemes, Ashman begins with the Earl and then shifts the point of view to his various underlings as each describes their preparations, and in doing so give a sense of what it was like to live in a thirteenth-century English castle. The rhymes have an appropriate leisurely pace energized by clever couplets such as this sentiment from the Cleaning Servant: “Scatter the rats. Now it’s perfectly clean— / Or at least good enough; we’re not serving the Queen!”
The intricate artwork portrays monastic illumination on each page and also hints at the caligraphy in the font that is used. This is a pretty realistic look at life in the 13th century in all levels of life. And the illistrations are stylized to look like many of the pictures in the manuscripts of the time. This is very different than the Disney Sleeping Beauty picture of the middle ages.
I am not sure I agree with the reviews on this title because they indicate that a first grader can and should pick up this book and read it. It has some difficult words, lots of words on a page, many pages, and difficult to read fonts. The first grader who would read this book would have to be very advanced. But I could see this as being picked up by an older kid and enjoying it (3rd-5th).
Quirky, sarcastic, and educational, this is a great first introduction to the way people lived before ipods and combustion engine.
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