I follow a blog by another librarian and she had her daughter blog about her favorite books. Using the Fahrenheit 451 premise, she considered remembering the text of The Great Good Thing if she had to. So...I had to check it out. It's an interesting story and not at all what I was expecting. The narrator breaks down the fourth wall, if that term can be used for writing, and identifies the book as what it is, a book, with characters in it who wait for readers to pick it up and read it. This device makes it difficult to read at first but sooner than later it breaks away from its own conventions and becomes a story about more than just storybook characters.
What it really deals with is death and dreams and how we pass things on to the ones we love. I found this to be a more interesting way to handle death with kids then in some of the other titles about this same subject. I also think this would be a great book to use in a creative writing unit about how we shape stories and what the role of the characters are. There is supposedly sequels, but I don't really know how they would connect.
Intended reading level: Grades 3-6 Interest level: Grade 4
Genre: fiction, fantasy (princess-storybook)
Comparable titles: The Tale of Desperaux
Book connections: dream journal
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