Afternoon on the Amazon

Afternoon on the Amazon by Mary Pope Osborne is a rain forest adventure for 7 year olds who like a fright that moves fast.

What happens

This one sits sixth in the Magic Tree House run, and the first two pages catch you up, so a new reader will be fine. Jack and Annie have been sent after four special things that will break a spell on Morgan le Fay, the magical librarian whose tree house they borrow. They found the first one in old Japan. Now a book has been left open at a picture of very tall green trees.

Annie is not keen. She did the rain forest at school and she remembers the bugs.

Jack is thrilled. He wants to take notes. He might even get to name a beetle nobody has named yet.

So down the ladder they go, through the treetops and into the gloom underneath, where the trees are enormous and the ground is all dead leaves. Jack looks it up and finds out that loads of creatures down here are camouflaged. Which means they are there. You just cannot see them.

Then something starts crackling.

What follows is one scrape after another, and honestly that is the fun of it. Army ants. A hollow log that turns out to be a canoe with no paddles. Pretty blue fish with red bellies and a lot of teeth. A vine Jack grabs that is cold and scaly and very much alive. A branch floating on the water that opens its jaws.

Your reader gets the facts as Jack gets them, a paragraph at a time out of his research book, usually about two seconds too late to be useful. It is a lovely trick. You end up learning how long the Amazon is while worrying about a crocodile.

It is properly tense in places without ever turning nasty. Nothing is harmed. Jack works out afterwards that none of it was being mean at all. The ants were just marching, because that is what army ants do.

There is also a small mouse called Peanut riding in Annie's pocket, who does something rather wonderful near the end. And a monkey who keeps chucking fruit at them, which Annie takes very personally.

What to read next

If your child races through this one, they'll want to know how the hunt for the four things started. Night of the Ninjas is the trip just before, and it's in the library too. That's where Peanut turns up, where Morgan's note runs out halfway through a word, and where Jack and Annie land in a cave belonging to a ninja master.