Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner is a wonderful adventure about a boy who is very poor and gets his money stolen on the train when he goes to sleep. The adventure is about how he gets his money back.
The main character, named Emil, meets some very reliable friends who help him on the quest to get his money back. Their adventure is so big and exciting because you never know what's going to happen next. You never know if he has won or lost and several times you are convinced he has lost his money.
It was first published in Britain in 1931, so as you can see it's not a new book. The setting is in Germany. The time and the place affect the book by the ways that they do things such as how one of the boys is called The Professor which wouldn't be very likely in England today. I liked the fact that it was set in Germany because it felt different from most books, because most books are set in Britain and it's all about what British people would do, and this is an example that shows you whatr life was like in Germany in the 1920s.
This weekend there was a production of Emil and the Detectives on Radio Four which was good but I imagined the voices different, because they sounded like they were cockneys and I didn't imagine that. I thought they'd use better English. The producation did not change the story which I thought was good and it was as still as exciting as the book. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them
My star rating: five out of five.
This would be good for eight years plus.
Sorry for the delay in posting the review, the next one will come soon. Please leave comments on this and also on the last one - Bloggs's guest blog.
