Month of January 2022: Young Reader’s Classics

Not listed in the Accelerated Reader’s Program (ages 8-14 yrs, 2nd-8th grade)
A children’s classic originally published in 1922.

Thornton Burgess grew up in Sandwich, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he spent his time exploring around the water and woods and fell in love with nature. He started telling these stories to his one and only son. Then, he began a daily column in the New York Tribune. Finally, they were published in book form. His first novel, “Old Mother West Wind”, was published in 1910. They are stories that teach.

After reading this adventure story, kids will love envisioning what the crows may be thinking and doing next time they are out playing in the woods and hear them cawing. Burgess combines real characteristics of the crows behaviors with teachable moments for children…and the child may not even realize they are being taught because it’s the animals talking.

Blacky the Crow has two adventures. First, he has to decide just how important it is to satisfy his hunger for a couple of owl eggs. Does he risk his life and the lives of his friends? Second, is it worth risking his own life to warn his duck friends of the hunter who is hiding out nearby and coercing them into the area by putting out corn every morning, giving them a false sense of security?

I loved it! This would be a really good bedtime story to read to your young kids. Maybe a chapter or two a night. I’m thinking my two young hunter grandsons would love this. They have very imaginative minds. But I don’t think it will turn them off from deer hunting in the least. They love it too much.

READ IT FREE

Can be downloaded for free to your Kindle or read online at Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4979 ( )

This little book is about some things that happen to Blacky, a crow in Burgess's community of talking wildlife. There are some daily doings of Blacky as he moves about searching for food, pestering his neighbors, rousing up his flock to mob larger birds of prey, acting with great curiosity and caution when he finds new things, and other typical crow behavior.

There are three storylines. The first story tells how Blacky discovers that the owls have set up housekeeping very early in the spring, and he tries to find a way to steal the owls' eggs to eat. Then the timeline suddenly jumps to fall and we have a new story about Blacky getting involved with two different groups of ducks, warning them from the threat of hunters in the fall. The final story is again about eggs. Blacky spies two eggs in a hen's nest just inside the door of the henhouse and is tempted to steal them. I did like these stories. They are a bit repititious and stuffed with moral lessons as usual for Burgess, but I don't mind.

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