The 13-Story Treehouse
Cleverly stupid? Stupidly clever? I'm not sure.
Hey all, hope the new school year (whether or not you operate on that schedule) is treating you well.
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Now onto…
The Series: The 13-Story Treehouse
The Author: Andy Griffiths
The Illustrator: Terry Denton
Length/Picture Density: 250ish pages, but that’s at least half illustrations.
These books are about their own author and illustrator, named Andy and Terry respectively. At the start of each book, we are introduced to them and their treehouse, which starts at 13 stories, and gains another 13 with each volume (so the 2nd one is called The 26-Story Treehouse and they keep going from there). The treehouse includes features like an ice cream parlor run by a robot, a shark tank, a training area for ninja snails, and much much more.
Once that’s established, they learn that they are a day or so from their deadline for the book they haven’t started. Then a bunch of crazy stuff happens (getting to that shortly) that pulls them away from writing the book, and then in the end they write the book about their adventures and ship it off just in time to their publisher, Mr. Big Nose.
The beginning and end are always the same. The middle is a non-sensical screwball comedy where things get juvenile pretty fast.
Here’s just a random smattering of things that happen in these books:
-Andy acquires sea monkeys, except one of the sea monkeys is actually a shape-shifting monster who seduces Andy with the intent of devouring him.
-They arrive on an island of someone who files everything into alphabetized drawers, including people.
-They get captured by aliens and made to participate in some kind of massive battle royale.
-They go camping, but their camping trip is disrupted by creatures whose entire modus operandi is capturing people in sacks, and then whacking the sacks while chanting “hobyah!”
These aren’t full book plots, just episodes of a few chapters. These books are a never-ending barrage of off-beat humor, slapstick, and randomness. And yet, they can be pretty clever, and the plots are…tighter than I’m making them sound. The fun trick of these books is that they will introduce all manner of random insanity and then have it all tie back in and matter in some way in the end.
Actually, here is an attempt to recreate the plot of the most recent one I read (you can skip to the next divider line if this gets to be too much):
-Andy has a toothache and it is inhibiting his ability to write
-They have to submit their book at 2:30 (the whole point of it being this time is the “tooth-hurty” joke)
-A passing plane pulling a banner informs them of the “Joke Writer 2000,” a pencil that writes jokes for you.
-They decide to get one at the $2 shop in their treehouse, but the shopkeeper, a crab who likes to sing, just ran out. They try the $2 million dollar shop, where the same pencil is in stock (in fact, everything at the two shops seems to be identical), but they realize they only have $2, not $2 million.
-Fortunately there is a machine that makes money in their treehouse, so they go to that and flip on the money making switch.
-Unfortunately, Terry accidentally switches the machine to “honey” and all of their money gets covered in honey.
-Bears show up to eat the honey.
-Somehow Andy and Terry end up in a bun-throwing fight with the bears.
-They end up in a tower to hide from the bears (who I think start throwing refrigerators at some point) and their friend Jill, who loves and is beloved by all animals, shows up to save them.
-I’m getting exhausted summarizing at this level of detail (and I’m starting to forget parts), but after that they concoct a scheme involving pulling Andy’s tooth out and giving it to the tooth fairy, but the tooth is stolen by a bird who lives near the summit of Mt. Everest (which is in their treehouse), so they climb a never-ending staircase to reach the bird, get to the nest, but have to pretend to be baby birds first, which involves eating worms. There’s a scene where Terry follows the tooth fairy, and one where they buy money from the $2 shop to use at the $2 million shop. The pencil plan falls apart after it writes three jokes for them, but by that point Andy is feeling better, so he’s able to write the book.
I no longer get any real pleasure out of these books, but I did for a while. They’re more willing to be weird than other books in a way I kind of appreciate.
But this same sense of irreverence that makes these fun doesn’t limit itself to stuff parents are going to fully approve of. There is cartoon violence, gross humor, and one-off jokes in which the main characters’ heads are literally flying off with no consequences to them. Leo loves that stuff and isn’t disturbed by it (it’s honestly hard to be truly disturbed by something that takes it self so unseriously), but they can get weird and cringy for me. There’s loads of crass humor and some of the jokes you roll your eyes at the first time turn out to be running gags.
Depending on your kid’s sense of humor, it may be hard to close Pandora’s box once they find these. That said, there’s a whole genre of these wacky, juvenile stories, and the Treehouse books are pretty good for what they are. It took me about six or seven to get tired of them. And then we read five more.
Genuinely curious: what do you all do with books and shows that your kid loves but are some combo of cringy and objectionable? I don’t resist too much — Leo has a pretty good media diet and I can tolerate some junk food. How about you?