"By the Great Horn Spoon!" by Sid Fleischman

Way back when I was ten or so, By the Great Horn Spoon! was the first Sid Fleischman book I ever encountered.  My mom read it aloud to my brother and I, and we laughed and laughed and laughed over it.  (My brother and I also picked up using "Blast!" like an expletive, like a ship's captain does in this book, which our mom eventually got very tired of.  I still say it when something goes wrong, thirty-some years later.  Very handy word, really.)

A few years ago, I read this aloud to my own kids.  We also laughed a lot over it.  I reread it again this week because I'm using it in a literature class for 3rd-5th grades that I'm teaching at our homeschool-coop.  And I laughed again.  What a rollicking good adventure this is!

Twelve-year-old Jack and his family's butler, Praiseworthy, stow away on a ship headed for the California gold fields.  The Gold Rush of 1849 is on, and our heroes are anxious to make their fortunes in gold, not because they want to be rich, but so they can save Jack's Aunt Arabella from losing her home.  Aunt Arabella has raised Jack and his sisters, who are orphans, and Jack can't bear the thought of her losing the house that has sheltered them all for so long.  Praiseworthy would do anything to help Aunt Arabella too, so the plucky heroes are off to make a fortune for her.  

Along the way, they encounter an array of peculiar and hilarious characters, from an irascible and competitive ship's captain to a gold miner who mixes his coffee beans with ground up acorns.  It's a tall tale in the grand tradition of American storytelling, and I love it very much.  It not only made me laugh aloud while reading it over again this week, it even made me get tears in my eyes when I hit the very last three lines.  Wonderful stuff.

Particularly Good Bits:

The stagecoach climbed as if it were part mountain goat.  It lurched, it halted, it bucked, it leaped, and it clung (p. 110).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG.  There's no bad language, but there's a bit of violence involving a boxing match, a scene where a man is nearly lynched, a stagecoach robbery, and several times when the main characters are in great peril.  Nothing actually bad really happens to them, ever, but very young readers might worry a lot about them at times.