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    The Magic Faraway Tree
    Unavailable
    The Magic Faraway Tree
    Unavailable
    The Magic Faraway Tree
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    The Magic Faraway Tree

    Written by Enid Blyton

    Narrated by Kate Winslet

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Enid Blyton's much loved The Faraway Tree stories read by Kate Winslet are now available as unabridged audio downloads for the first time.

    The Magic Faraway Tree is the second magical story in the Faraway Tree series by the world's best-loved children's author, Enid Blyton.

    When Joe, Beth and Frannie move to a new home, they discover an Enchanted Wood just outside their doorstep. Soon they find the Faraway Tree, which is the beginning of many magical adventures...Join them and their new friends Silky the fairy, Saucepan Man and Moonface, as they discover which new land awaits them at the top of the Faraway Tree.

    Will they visit the Land of Treats, the Land of Spells, or the Land of Do-As-You-Please? Come with them on an amazing adventure — there will be magic and fun at every turn.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette UK Audio
    Release dateDec 12, 2013
    ISBN9781444920819
    Unavailable
    The Magic Faraway Tree

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    Reviews for The Magic Faraway Tree

    4/5

    312 ratings7 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Oh, if only there are lands like the ones on top of the Tree.
    • 4/5
      Another brilliant Enid Blyton book that I loved as a child. I really liked the idea of their being different worlds you could explore at the top of the tree.
    • 4/5
      I like the lands in the audio book and the characters are amazing. Matthew, 6 years old, !
    • 5/5
      Dick thought it would be dull in the country with Jo, Bessie and Fanny. But that was before he found the magic Faraway Tree!
      The four children have the most extraordinary adventures with the Saucepan Man,
      Moon-Face and Silky the fairy. They only have to climb through the cloud at the top of the huge tree to be in the Land of Spells, or Land of Topsy-Turvy, or even the Land of Do-As-You-Please!

      What do I really like about this story? (Well, apart from the abundance of humour and fantasy throughout this book) - When a friend needs help, they all work together as a team and find a solution - it's absolutely charming!

      What fun! - These characters are marvellous. Fabulous illustrations. This book is perfect for young children who like to use their imagination.

    • 5/5
      This is an important book to me. The Faraway Tree is the book that made me 'click on' to reading. I still remember my father coming home with it one day -- there must have been a book club at his office -- and he read me one chapter before dinner. I remember begging him to continue. The chapters always seemed far too short. Fortunately I was almost at the age where I could read myself, and before long I had my hands on the prequel and the sequel and I must have read them many times over between the ages of five and eight or so.

      I'm keen to click my own daughter onto reading. I wonder if it was different a generation ago, when the only real competitor for a five year old's attention was a few hours of Playschool and The Smurfs per day (not real competitors at all). Now, here in Australia there are two entire television channels dedicated to advertisement free children's programming -- ABC 2 for the little ones and ABC 3 for the slightly older ones. My daughter is now at the age where she's done with ABC 2 (Peppa Pig excluded) and I'm keen to keep her away from the mindless cartoons of ABC 3. I'm determined that the kid will love reading, whether she likes it or not.

      Except she loves iPad games and Steam games and happens to be surprisingly adept at them. Her father is the same. I can see into the future, the two of them sitting side by side playing networked Terraria, which is all well and good, except I want the kid to be one of those increasingly rare individuals who love both gaming AND reading in equal measure. Strategy games have their own charms, and I'd have loved them too, had they existed, but please dog, not at the expense of the books.

      So it's with great relief that I pulled out The Magic Faraway Tree -- for the third time over a period of months -- and finally managed to engage her attention. I was wondering if the story might have dated too much, if what seemed like fantasy to me back in the early 80s has been eclipsed by the fantasy of computer games and a wider variety of TV. Perhaps after an early childhood of well-written picturebooks, the language of Enid Blyton seemed dull, expository and dated, even to a child's ear?

      But no, I think these worries are unfounded. It's exactly the childlike turn of phrase that draws a five year old in, as it drew me in a full two generations after the series was first published. I have to remind myself: It was old even then.

      And it was wonderful to have my daughter run to me throughout the day clasping this beautifully illustrated deluxe edition, begging me to read another chapter, snuggling in despite the heat of summer, jumping up and down at the mention of Pop Biscuits. On that point, I have promised to buy her a packet of 'Pop Biscuits' upon completion of the story, and that's a big deal in our house because we rarely bring sugar into the house. Growing up in New Zealand, I always thought 'Pop Biscuits' were probably 'Toffee Pops' manufactured by Griffins, which are unavailable in Australia, so I'll have to find something similar. I think I've seen a toffee pop rip-off at Aldi. I will divide the packet and wrap them up in coloured foil. I hope they live up to my daughter's expectations. I'm glad I promised Pop Biscuits rather than Toffee Shocks.

      Although I did bribe my kid into getting through this book, and I did it with sugar, it did work. All of this demonstrates how important food is in fiction, to both beneficial and not so beneficial effect. (As I type, eggs are boiling on the stove, because yesterday Peppa Pig ate boiled eggs for breakfast at her grandmother's. Ergo, we must eat boiled eggs for breakfast at ours.)

      There are well-known problems with the work of Enid Blyton in a world which no longer has such tolerance for sexism and racism. The sexism shines particularly brightly in this series. Although this book is an ensemble cast of two boys and two girls, the spotlight shines firmly upon the two boys. Bessie is a mute female analogue of Jo, and Fanny is seen but not heard. When quizzed on her favourite character, my daughter mentioned 'Dick, because he is naughty'. Dick is indeed interesting, and Jo is responsible, coming up with every single solution and good idea. 'Hurry along with those sandwiches, Bessie and Fanny,' orders Jo at one stage. I was one of the minority who thought that the new updated version of The Famous Five was a brilliant idea -- Blyton's excellent storytelling combined with more enlightened roles for girls sounds like a match made in heaven, though I haven't read any of those yet so I don't know how well that worked. What a parent may do when reading The Faraway Tree to a young modern reader is occasionally give the girls some of the good ideas by switching out Jo's lines with the names of Bessie or Fanny. If I'd been more alert I'd have done just that, though I do have two more books during which to give this a go.

      Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of this book was something I'd forgotten all about, and obviously thought nothing of as a child -- the violence, otherwise known as 'spanking'. The chapter called 'Dick Gets Everyone Into Trouble' is really odd and as an adult reader I couldn't help but read all sorts of extra things into it. Domestic violence, for example. It's easy to forget that spanking was a completely acceptable way of discipline just three generations ago.

      Since I own the deluxe editions of this series, I'm left wishing for more illustrated editions of chapter books. I don't mean simple line drawings and cartoons, either, I mean hardbacks with dust covers and illustrations on the colophon, beautifully coloured pages on beautiful smelling paper and wonderfully detailed painterly illustrations which invite the reader to linger. This book was a good reminder to me how important illustrations are to young readers. It's worth buying beautifully illustrated books for children, because even if they do seem expensive, printing has become a lot more affordable since the 1980s when these were published, and I feel lucky to own these exact books, because it seems the deluxe versions are no longer available.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Really, how could anyone not enjoy this trippy wartime (published in 1943) tale of escape to magical places with truly interesting residents? The Faraway Tree was introduced in [The Enchanted Wood], which I didn't know before picking this one up. I don't know if I'm missing some crucial stuff by not having read that book first, but I never felt more than the ordinary sense of needing to know what was going on that comes with reading a new-to-me book.What happens in the course of the kids' adventures in the various faraway fairy realms was fun...I ***really*** want to visit the Land of Topsy-Turvy!...but not a patch on the fact that these childrens' mother/aunt, the Responsible Party of Record for their safety, blithely lets them go off for an entire day, no idea where they are, and when they come home and share their adventures, she doesn't reach for the phone to get a shrink STAT but indulgently laughs and allows them to do it again! (After they finish all their chores, of course. Which they do uncomplainingly. Which is how you know this is a novel.)And then, then!, she allows one of them to SPEND THE NIGHT in parts unknown to her! Now times were different in 1943, but that one's just not on. No responsible adult has *ever* let a kid spend the night somewhere without knowing 1) where and 2) who and 3) when and how Sweetums will be going there and coming home.So while this is a fun little fantasy of life in worlds where people are called Moon-Face and Dame Washalot and trees grow the fruits that will best suit your needs at that moment to a kid, to a grandpa it's an astoundingly different and really quite uneasy-making fantasy.I decided to read this book because Henry Bird, of the 10th season of The Great British Bake Off, made a showstopper cake using this book as its theme. He is, or was depending on when you're reading this review, a literature student at university, and this book was one of his childhood favorites. So why not, it's only $3.99 on the Kindle, and getting out of my usual literary haunts is always a good idea. I didn't love it, but I didn't expect to; in fact I liked it quite a bit more than I expected to and that is a wonderful thing for a reader in his seventh decade of reading.
    • 1/5

      4/10.

      In the Magic Faraway tree live Moon-Face, Saucepan Man and Silky the Fairy and they all go on adventures to the magical lands atop the tree with some local children.