The Magic Treehouse Series
Or the merits and pitfalls of being highly formulaic.
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Okay, onto the main course…
The Series: The Magic Treehouse
The Author: Mary Pope Osborne
The Illustrator: Salvatore Murdocca
Length/Picture density: Ten chapters, 60-70 pages, pictures on most spreads.
The Premise: A brother and younger sister discover a magic tree house about a ten minute walk from their house. It sends them off to a historical time and place where they have to accomplish something, narrowly escape danger, then be back at the treehouse by chapter ten.
The Formula: Jack or Annie — usually Annie — realizes on page one or two that the treehouse is back, they go there and find a book about the time and place they are off to, and then before Jack can do any prep, Annie says the magic words and off they go.
After some “what in the world is happening!?!?” in the first few books, they get the hang of it and the treehouse becomes a special delight that they look forward to.
Jack always brings the book about the place they’re in along on the adventure, reading and taking notes on it throughout. This happens in some truly improbable scenarios — we’re being stalked by ninjas! Let’s look up ninjas in the book! — but Leo never complained or pointed that out.
The writing is solid with some language patterns across books that your kid might enjoy. The stories are filled with facts about historical times and places, and provide a good first pass on all sorts of history. The two main characters are consistently rendered and develop over time. However…
The kids are really stereotyped for the first, say, 20 books. Annie is intuitive, impulsive, whimsical, daring. Jack is regimented, studious, and attempts to prepare for everything (and inevitably has to stop to chase Annie who has run off in some direction based on intuition). I have a theory that every “odd couple” story is about a regimented, orderly person and a chaotic, intuitive person, but the way the siblings are realized has an unavoidably gendered feel to it.
Jack is kind of condescending to her in the earlier books, but develops a respect for Annie’s intuitions, in part because they’re more or less always right.
To be fair, they defy certain other gender stereotypes – Annie is not dainty, Jack is not macho. Eventually they get more nuanced while keeping those basic traits. I talked to one person who said she would sometimes switch the names for books at a time to undo the gender tropes.
The telling of history isn’t problematic, just overly tidy. There are people who need saving, but we don’t encounter systemic cruelty, racism, slavery, oppression etc. The first one came out in 1992, and the books have a certain 90s-era respect toward other cultures that avoids difficult conversations.
The plot across books exists, but it moves incredibly slowly. That’s generally fine — the individual stories are the focus — but even my four (at the time) year-old rolled his eyes when the second book revealed that there is a wizard involved whose name starts with M, and then the third book revealed…another clue that this wizard’s name does indeed start with M. Everything happens in sets of four books, and sometimes the author is tapped out on clues to drop by book three.
The ethos feels quaint, but it’s one that can really work for certain ages and personalities. Basically, if your kid can feel a swell of inspiration from the phrase, “it turns out the only ship we needed was a friendship,” then these books should really click. (That exact phrase isn’t in the books, but at points it gets pretty close to that.)
The quality across books is very consistent, so if you liked the first few, there are about 60 more waiting for you. The first is about dinosaurs, a topic that through my own informal research appeals to 100% of four to six-year-olds.
The one about the Titanic (#17), which, oh hey, happened to be published right around the time a very popular movie on the same subject came out, creeped me out. Jack and Annie interact with stuffy rich people who are an hour from death but won’t heed their warnings. They save a less well off family, so that’s nice, but I spent a lot of the reading bracing for questions about most of the passengers drowning and how that actually happened. That didn’t come up (phew), and the books usually are written to not really point out that some of the events they witness (e.g. the eruption of Pompeii, the 1908 San Francisco earthquake) killed thousands of people. And hey, if you want to go there I won’t fault you, but I’m glad I didn’t end up having a bunch of death conversations right before my kid went to bed.
There are 30ish Magic Treehouse books, and about that many Merlin Mission books. The Merlin Missions are the same basic idea, but longer, fewer pictures, stronger book-to-book threads, and more openly magical. The treehouse ones have the magic of the treehouse, but in chapters 2-9, it’s mostly just the kids managing things in wherever they have been dropped off. The Merlin Missions have wizards and other magical beings casting spells and seeking enchanted artifacts. While the Magic Treehouse books take on a historical time and place for the kids to get a tour of (with Jack playing the role of annoying tour guide), the Merlin Missions work off of mythology, and are more fantastical.
Leo eventually lost interest, but it took about thirty books for that to happen. These are worth a look, and if you get on a good streak, they can keep you going for months. We had dabbled with some Roald Dahls, but this is the series that really got us going on chapter books.