Edgar and Ellen: Tourist Trap - Charles Ogden

Title: Tourist Trap (Edgar & Ellen)

Author: Charles Ogden

Read By: Ariadne Meyers

Publisher: Scholastic Audio Books

Genre: Children’s Books, Action and Adventure, Humor

Number of Cd’s and/or Total running time: 4 CD’s / 3 hours and 3 minutes

ISBN-10: 0439924987

Link to the Author’s and/or Publisher’s Website: Simon and Schuster

Link to Amazon.com for purchase (if applicable): Tourist Trap (Edgar & Ellen)

Release Date (if applicable): 02.01.2007

Brief Summary:

From the Simon and Schuster Website:

Meddling Mayor Knightleigh plans to build a new hotel on the site of the twins’ beloved junkyard. A busload of influential financiers and journalists is scheduled to come to town, and their reaction could very well cement the mayor’s bid to draw a steady stream of tourists to Nod’s Limbs. To save the junkyard and scuttle the hotel plans, Edgar and Ellen commandeer the tour, guiding visitors to bogus highlights
like the quicksand lair of the Limbsless Monster, the crabapple tree where escaped convicts congregate, and the Wax Museum’s melted marvels. At the grand French Toast Festival, Edgar caps the day by loosing the equivalent of 513,080 bottles of maple syrup on the assembled revelers—sticky sweet chaos, and surely enough to spell doom for the tourism initiative. The widely-read travel writer is driven to the brink—but in the book’s final chapter, we see she may have passed the brink altogether: her published review of the day’s lunacy makes Nod’s Limbs sound like an ideal destination for an adventurous traveler. The hotel, it seems, will proceed as scheduled.

Personal Review:

This one was bought as a Christmas present for the children and during our summer vacation we finally had a chance to listen to it. The great part of this audiobook personally was that my daughter also had the print version and read along as we listened.

I am going to review this based on the perspective of my children. I did quite enjoy the book (although the shrill voices and songs at times did make me reach for the volume knob more than once)

Edgar and Ellen are alone in a huge house and play in the junkyard daily. What kid cannot be drawn in immediately to a parent-less world of imagination!

When the kids catch wind of the Mayor’s plans for a hotel that will remove the junkyard they spring into action. Clever plans and well thought out mis-deeds allow the kids to turn a simple visit from influential people into a series of horrifying, funny and sometimes outright silly events that have all but one of the dignitaries screaming for home.

The grand French Toast festival and all that comes with it topped of a great book that moved quickly and kept even my 9 year old boy away from his iPod for a few hours and engaged in the action (and accompanied conversation about the book) and for that reason alone I give it an excellent rating.

Rating: Excellent