Book Review: Earthquake in the Early Morning

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Earthquake in the Early Morning

Author: Mary Pope Osborne

Date: 2001

Publisher: Scholastic / Random House

ISBN: 0-439-37116-3

Length: 72 pages of main text; unnumbered pages of foreword and afterwords

Illustrations: drawings by Sal Murdocca

Quote: "He tried to pull her out of the crack, but she was too heavy...He gathered an armload of bricks. Then he went back to the crack and handed them down to Annie."

In the Magic Tree House series, contemporary children called Jack and Annie are sent to visit interesting moments in time on behalf of Morgan le Fay, who in this series is being a Good Witch and cooperating with King Arthur by serving as the court librarian at Camelot. (Need it be mentioned that she won't send the children to explore the traditional histories that report what she did as a Wicked Witch.)

In this book, they visit San Francisco just in time to see the 1906 earthquake. The magic tree house outfits them with period-appropriate clothes so they won't be conspicuous while collecting the documents Morgan orders for her library, so Annie gets a cute sailor-collar dress just in time to get covered in dust as she falls into a crevice formed by the quake...but, protected by magic, she's not hurt and climbs out as fast as she can stack up bricks to stand on.

They try to change history by warning someone that what he's doing won't work. He ignores the warning.

They meet two generic boys who are called Peter and Andrew. In real life many brothers have been named after the brother saints, but Osborne wants the world to know these two were "based on" her nephews, also called by those names. For fictional purposes, Peter and Andrew get to be the kids who scrawled an anonymous message on a piece of wood that Osborne reports having seen in a museum.

One more odd bit of fiction in this book is based on a tidbit of real history, and since the story is so short and the ending such a foregone conclusion, I'll leave that for readers to find.

The copies of the Magic Tree House books that I have were, like the copies of the Baby-Sitters Club books, added to my personal library not so much for reading (The Nephews have outgrown them) as to suggest doll outfits. To order a doll in a hand-knitted outfit inspired by Annie's on the cover, send $10 for the doll, $5 for the book, plus the usual $5 per package and $1 per online payment. Leaving the dolls out of it, these are very small, thin books, of which twelve would probably fit into a $5 package for a total of $65 or $66. If you buy them here this web site will send $1 per book to Osborne or a charity of her choice.