Children of the Noisy Village

If you don't mind certain Christmas myths being blown for your kids, this is a perfectly good recording, and certainly kept both my four year old girl and nine year old boy's attention. However, it also gives the game away on the former subject which I am not ready to have happen, especially for my four-year-old. Very disappointing. I am just hoping they missed it and have deleted it from iTunes.

This was our first audiobook for our 6 and 5 year olds and they loved it. The book is charming and easy to follow and the content is age-appropriate (our kids tend to get scared very easily). The narration could be a bit more animated, but overall it was excellent.

Although not technically a series of short stories, each chapter does stand alone for the most part with charming, gentle stories of rural life in long ago Sweden. My 3 and 5 year old girls were completely captivated.

However I have to agree with the reviewer who mentioned the Christmas issue. I was very glad I was paying attention when it was playing in the car and I suddenly heard a sentence begin with words along the lines of "When I was little I used to believe there was a real..." Luckily I slammed on the off button on time and I told them the CD ran out! Thankfully they didn't suspect a thing. I would have been devastated to ruin the magic of Christmas for my little ones in such an unexpected way with such an otherwise charming book. (Tip, I had burnt this to disc for the car. My husband afterwards burnt another copy deleting what was track 10 for us so that we could remove any danger of a repeat)

My 3 boys (ages 4, 6 & 8) loved, loved, loved this - and so did I. So much so that we found the other Noisy Village book ('Happy Times in Noisy Village') at the library & read it cover to cover. This book describes a wonderful, simple time of children growing up in a Swedish village as neighbors. My kids hooted & hollered at the stories - and I developed a deeper craving to live in a place where the kids could have terrific adventures out in nature just like the characters in the book. I'm just very sad there aren't more Noisy Village books out there - how is that possible when there are endless ninja warrior books & humorless tales of bratty kids hating their siblings??

This was a very nice story reminiscent of Little House on the Prairie or Anne of Green Gables...just a story of life, family, friends. I was pleased to find something that wasn't about vampires or witches or dragons. My only caveat is that the book is read at a very slow pace, which annoyed us all for the first bit until we really were drawn into the story. I wouldn't skip it because of that though, it's worth getting settled into the pace to enjoy this pleasant book.