Reading Tai-Bo

I just finished reading Curse of the Spider King by Wayne Thomas Batson and Christopher Hopper. I will often set whichever book I am reading on the lamp table in our living room (unless it is on my Nook) and I can tell if the publisher has nailed the cover if my boys stop to look. This book was one of those. It features a castle besieged by a bunch of knights riding giant spiders crossing a web bridge to attack. The boys just sat and stared and commented to each other about the “bridge made of web” and the spiders and all.

And the book was great too. I have been burned in the past by Christian YA, but this book provided a wonderful reading experience. I was pulling for the characters right away and curious about the mysterious strangers who were haunting their lives. It was a bit difficult to keep track of seven main characters plus all of the elves and bad guys and attacking trees. And the authors should have picked less names that ended in “Y”. I got Jimmy, Johnny, and Tommy mixed up a lot. But once I got myself unscrambled it was a great book.

What did I learn from reading…that you draw different readers in with different types of material. This book starts with a short prologue with some elves looking over a ruined city, then it jumps right into the lives of the seven children on earth. I wasn’t really excited about the story until it picked up on earth, however the short scene with the elves and the city is the whole reason why my husband stole the book away from me to read it. The prologue intrigued him, while the first chapter intrigued me. Interesting.