Chancy and the Grand Rascal was a book that my mom enjoyed reading and one that I enjoy too! The story kind of takes you in with it! I loved it!!

In the same light as the delightful Mr Mysterious & Co, this time the author of The Whipping Boy takes us to Tom Sawyer country for a delightful look at swindlers, liars, and cheats, and the good people who rise above it all.

This is one the best books I've ever read. It sucks you in so quickly that it's unbelievelable. Great storyline, great dialouge, and great characters are the things that make this book up. Thanks to the mastermind Sid Fleischman.....

A charming and fun book for children -great charachters, well written, a childhood favorite of mine that I've passed along to others. Part of the fun is the behind-the-scenes look at a traveling old west magic show!

I once saw a talk by science fiction author Ray Bradbury, when he became exasperated with a audience member and said "The Grapes of Wrath is a great book because it's about a family!" And that's what this book is about: a family.
Mr. Mysterious & Co. a family headed west, twenty years after the civil war, performing a magic stage show in small, western towns. The three children, ages 12, 9, and 6, each have their own conflicting dreams, fears and desires.
But what really makes this book work is not just that it is well written, and the characters are supurb, it's that it is about a family, and some of the struggles that familes have. Jane, the oldest, wonders when she can have real friends and stop being a child. Paul, the middle child, wants to keep traveling and "having adventures." Anne, the youngest, looks forward to "settling down," and living in a town.
Even though this book was written forty years ago, it still holds up well. It was one of my favorite books as a kid, and remains so today. I must have read this thirty times, and have given away at least twenty copies.
If you're looking for an interesting, funny, gentle, and simply altogether charming book about the old west--this is it. ...

My 11 year old and I both enjoyed this book. The story is set in the Old West and holds one's interest with lots of humor and suprising twists in the adventures.

This book will lead young readers to a sense of fright as a ghost is loose on the town! Find out the secrets of Professer Pepper and his sidekick. Find out what really happened at the famous ghostraising!

Excellent book for young readers twisting and turning thru thesuspenseful fog, with a deeper meaning and message for all. Opie isgiven a ticket to watch a ghost raising when he leads a stranger to town in the fog. Aunt Etta has her doubts, and Professor Pepper proves her right! Opie comes out the hero with his quick witted skills and brave heart, with a surprise twist in the middle.

Another delightful and funny book, this time about a traveling family, bound for Humbug Mountain to find a rich relative and settle down in peace. This being a Fleischman novel, you can bet there are plenty of twists and turns along the way--and laughs to go with them. Check it out!

This book has an amazing combination of mystery, adventure, fantasy, and everything in between! When a family decides to head to a new land they are amazed at what they find and how they going to servive! I couldn't put this book down untill I finished the last page, and then I read it over again!

Me and the Man on the Moon-Eyed Horse is a great story about a boy who lives out west with his grandfather and sister. He likes to help his grandfather at the telegraph office, where he learns morse code. When a dangerous criminal comes through with his gang to derail the train, and cut the telegraph wires, the young boy uses his wits and his sisters prized red velvet curtains to save the day.

When I was in elementary school, and mostly hanging around the library shelves near Charlie's Factory and Encyclopedia Brown's garage, my librarian handed me this book, and I realized how much of the unexposed portions of the library had the potential to be this wonderful!

It tells the story of a travelling magician in the old west and his family as they set out from city to city putting on shows and having the most humorus and delightful adventures along the way. Particularly for those interested in magic, it will entrance the curious and amuse those looking to be entertained.

By the Great Horn Spoon is such an exciting book! Jack Flagg and his butler Praiseworthy set out to the gold fields to save his Aunt Arabella's fortune. They go on sea journey and are headed to the gold mines. On the way, they meet some hilarious people. In the gold country, everyone has a nickame. In this book, you'll find the most hilarious nicknames.This book is so funny that you will have a stomach ache from laughing and it is so good that you will not be able to put it down. While you are busy enjoying the book, you will be learnig about the gold rush in the year 1912 in San Francisco, California.This book is good for both adults and children. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading a funny, interesting, and exciting book.

I think that By the Great Horn Spoon! has a great adventure. It is about a boy and his family's butler who sail from Boston, Massachusetts to California during the gold rush. The boy's name is Jack, and the butler's name is Praiseworthy. They make quite a few friends but also get themselves into a lot of trouble. This book was funny, interesting, and bit disappointing at some points. Sid Fleischman is a wonderful author, and By the Great Horn Spoon! is one of the best books I have ever read. I would recommend it to anyone who likes books about adventure.

When I was nine, I read this book. At age 40, I read the same copy to my children, ages ten and eight. As much as I enjoyed reading it the first time, reading it out loud was a much richer experience.

The writing flows naturally, and encourages a great variation in expression. The adventure truly comes out in the reader's voice. I am an actor, but I felt that this story would bring out the actor in anybody.

The story was so exciting and surprising that long reading sessions never dragged. At several points, my children threw themselves down on the floor and yelled, "Oh my gosh!"

This experience brought it all together for me, if I may speak personally: books, performing, involvement with my children, a classic story that I relished as a child myself. Those evenings added up to the happiest time of my life.

The plot concerns a boy who runs away during the California gold rush--with his butler!--to try to get his family out of debt. The adventures along the way are episodic, and each episode is an amazing and believable story in itself. Every step in the journey is given full attention: the voyage from Boston to San Francisco, the trip to the gold fields, the experiences among the miners. There are plenty of colorful characters, and plenty of opportunities for the two main characters to grow. There are also several threads that run through the whole story, maintaining suspense. Their resolution is unpredictable and satisfying.

There was very little in the book that could make a parent squirm, and very little that sounded out of date. But there were three moments that made me pause: 1) There is a fist fight, though it is handled in a light-hearted way. 2) There is a reference to corporal punishment when an adult threatens to "take a hairbrush" to a child. 3) There is an expression used once that might be innocent for all I know, but sure doesn't sound that way: "That's mighty white of you."

Minor reservations, I hope you'll agree. So plunge in and have an experience you and your listeners will never forget.

It was after reading this that I started raiding the used record stores around town, and began being a collector and appreciator of this musical genre. I fell in love with Joan Baez' music, as well and that of Richard & Mimi, Tom Rush, Kweskin, Eric Andersen, and so on; whereas before I'd not traveled further in this direction than Dylan, 'folk rock', and a little bit of Joni Mitchell.
It's very seldom that a writer can make you feel like you were there, but these guys did it for me, even 35 years further down the road.
A very passionate, and fulfilling reading [and learning] experience!

Many books get the history right, but so few get.... the wildness. If only for a model on how to write the story of YOUR music scene, you just gotta have this book. Period.

....It is a beautiful, vital, exciting work of cultural history and memory. Now that Bob Dylan has gone on to fame and fortune, the Club 47 scene is remembered mainly through its connection with him. (I first heard him sing as a skinny kid with a very rudimentary guitar style at the old Club 47, actually.) What you don't know unless you were there is that Dylan was a minor figure, somebody who had come up to Cambridge from NYC to be around people like Eric von Schmidt, Jim Rooney and Bill Keith (+ the shifting personnel of the Charles River Valley Boys), Jimmy Kweskin and the Jug Band (Muldaur, Fritz Richmond, etc. Joan Baez was an authentic product of this scene -- it was Debbie Green and the BU Putney school crowd taught her how to play a C chord -- and so were numerous others (e.g., Tom Rush) with amazing talent who are playing on the fringes today. Rudyard Kipling, paraphrasing a line in Virgil, said about a certain golden moment in his own cultural past: We were happy, and we knew we were happy. Nobody who wasn't part of the Cambridge folk revival in the late 1950s and early 1960s can ever know what it was like to be inside it -- it was like living inside a very vivid dream, in lots of ways -- but the greatest thing about Rooney and von Schmidt's book is that it recreates the feeling of that experience. It's not just "information" -- though the book is invaluable for that -- but LIVING the Club 47 days with the people who were actually out there in the kitchen of somebody's apartment, drinking beer and smoking a little dope and trying to figure out how to get their fingers around that Cm7 inversion that you can hear, just barely, on that scratchy old Charlie Patton record. Blues, bluegrass, Appalachian mountain songs, prison songs, Dust Bowl ballads, gospel tunes, they all went into the mix. They were more than music; they were a way of life. The closest thing I can imagine to being there is to put on an old Tom Rush or Jim Kweskin record, put your feet up, and read this book straight through. Five stars, absolutely. Six stars if they'd let you put them up.

What I Say about this book is that once you get into it you probably won't want to put it down just like I did. This book is about an orphan by the name of jingo hawks and his wild adventures with his "friend Mr. Peacok-Hemlock-Jones, As they search for a burried treasure.

The figurative language is delightful as well as the use of gypsy words such as "hatchi-witchu" and "chavo". Jingo and his companion are in a race for the treasure. Boys and girls alike enjoy this novel. I read it every year with my seventh graders and have my advanced students develop a project that requires higher level thinking skills.