Hi Americans. Here is an Amazon.com link to buy this book or do other shopping. https://amzn.to/3WqkKBz
Hi Canadians. Here is an Amazon.ca link to buy this book or do other shopping. https://amzn.to/3G0qFI9
So, please just go to whichever Amazon delivers in your region and shop! If you do, you won't pay a penny more, the author won't earn a penny less but I will earn a few pennies to buy more books to review. Thank you!
Thank you for coming back to Great Books for Kids Reviewed by Michelle Marcotte. I hope you are already a subscriber!
This is a chapter book for kids who like dogs, like adventures, and are willing believe whatever crazy story their grandfather tells them! The Last Castaways, a wild seafaring adventure, was written and illustrated by Harry Horse. Harry Horse was a well-known political cartoonist in the UK before he started writing crazily unbelievable and really funny adventure books for children.
There are three characters in this book, the Grandfather who is the unfortunate owner of a dog named Roo. Roo is headstrong and troublesome, rude, lazy, always hungry and talks a lot. The other character is a ship captain of a ramshackle, broken down and only barely seaworthy ship called The Unsinkable.
While the grandfather is happy to see the captain and the Unsinkable, fondly remembering that the captain had rescued him and Roo on a previous adventure to see polar bears, Roo is even more excited. At an auction, by mistake, Roo buys the ship at about one hundred times more than its real value.
So, the grandfather writes his grandchild a series of letters and journal notes about this ship adventure searching for cod fish which they intend to sell to pay for the ship.
Well, things go from bad to worse. Grandfather and Roo end up castaways on a desert island, or so they think. When they find a barefoot, bearded man wearing only red shorts and a robe, they mistake him for a crazy person and put him to work building a raft. Well, it turns out the crazy person was actually a hotel guest out for a walk on the beach and the castaways were not lost after all. They are sailed home by the ship captain and all is well until the next adventure.
This book is full of pen and ink drawings, doodles and cranky notes blaming Roo for all sorts of mishaps. It would be huge fun for an actual grandfather to read this to the kids. This book bears deliberate resemblance to Robinson Crusoe. But this book is much funnier. You can find it on both Amazon.com and Amazon.ca by following the affiliate links I placed in the section above.