It’s always a wonderful thing when you stumble on the perfect read-aloud series. Such is the case with author Frances Watts and her The Song of the Winns series. My son and I just finished the second book in the series (which Watts is still writing, so now we wait) called The Spies of Gerander. The story revolves around four young mice — two brothers, a sister and a friend — who must become spies. One team infiltrates the palace of the monarch bent on destroying their family’s homeland; the other team is off to rescue their parents from a prison island.
Needless to say, treachery abounds everywhere, and danger lurks behind every corner.
The Winns is a river flowing through the country in question, and it is slowly becoming the fulcrum upon which the plot turns and twists.
Watts does a wonderful job of setting two stories in motion, leaving the reader dangling at the edge of chapters, and then tying the stories together by the end while still leaving some larger stories unresolved. She did this with the first book in the series, too (The Secret of the Ginger Mice). She clearly is a master storyteller, and my son and I now wait for the third installment sometime in the future.
Peace (in the reading),
Kevin