To CASL friends,
Recently 44 copies of the book Up from Jericho Tel by E.L. Konigsburg were discovered in a book closet at one of my schools.
The book was published in 1986 and these are 1998 Follettbound editions - in excellent condition with pages slightly yellowed. According to Follett, the reading level is 6.1.
Please contact me off-list if you would like me to send you a set of these books. They would work for a book club or for a Language Arts teacher or for any other purpose you can come up with!
A review appears below.
Jannie Des Rosiers-Berman, LMS, Portland Public Schools
School Library Journal (May 1986)
Gr 5-9 ``There was a time when I was eleven years old. . .when I was invisible,'' begins Jeanmarie Troxell, future star and heroine of Konigsburg's humorous fantasy, which is set on Long Island in the early 1970s. Feeling invisible at her new school, Jeanmarie makes friends with Malcolm Soo, also a loner, over the burial of a dead blue jay. Digging in the earth mound they call Jericho Tel, they are whisked underground by Tallulah, the ghost of a red-haired actress, who wants them to discover her missing diamond. Now made truly invisible by Tallulah's Orgone box, they begin a search which leads to some very odd people, as well as to self-discovery and deeper friendship. By the time The Regina Stone is found, Jeanmarie has gained the confidence to shed her ``invisibility'' at school and try out for her first play. Konigsburg excels at creating unusual characters. She is less successful at tying her fantasy to the real world; there seems no particular ``rightness'' in Tallulah being reached through a hole in the ground in a trailer park. However, the wry humor of Jeanmarie and Malcolm's invisible adventures among Tallulah's old theatrical friends is worth the mental leap necessary to get there. Each chapter ends with one of Tallulah's maxims, such as ``a child actor is a vacuum that Nature has every right to abhor.'' Ruth S. Vose, San Francisco Public Library