The Mysterious Island (Secrets of Droon 3): 11/20/07

The Secrets of Droon series of books began in 1999 with The Hidden Stairs and the Magic Carpet. I happened to have a copy of the third in the series, The Mysterious Island, which I read before donating it to the BookCrossing literacy train.

The series comes highly recommended at Amazon but I found the one book I read to be nothing special. There are numerous series of books where children from present day get to travel to far away fantasy lands. These lands have names like Neverland, Oz, Narnia and so forth. Droon from what I saw is no where as interesting as Neverland, Oz or Narnia (and I'm not much a fan of Narnia). Droon is more akin to Dragon Land (Dragon Tales, PBS 1999).

In The Mysterious Island, Eric, Julie, and Neal travel down the staircase to Princess Keeah's ship. It might as well be Max, Emma and Enrique traveling to Dragon Land to Princess Kadoodle's ship: the characters seem interchangeable to me. Anyway, these three end up on a mysterious island with bugs and other weird stuff. The island belongs to evil Lord Sparr's witches. Ho hum.

I suppose younger readers who have started with the series from book one and are fans will enjoy book three. As a stand alone fantasy it doesn't hold up.

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