Product Details

• Published on: 2005-05-01
• Released on: 2005-05-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

Truly Magical
One need only look at the artwork of this book to be enraptured, and led into the world of Isabel Allende's fathomless imagination. From her debut, The House of the Spirits, Allende has kept magical realism alive in literature with her myriad of wild and wacky characters, living their legacies of love and loss. In this book, the third of a trilogy, Allende whisks us off to the forrest of Ngobe where Alex and his fellow adventurer are inevitably confronted with a multitude of dangers. This book is recommended for children, but I am 27 and was excited, frightened and amazed all the way through. Forest of the Pygmies is a beautiful journey into the heart of a foreign land, told by an amazingly imaginaive, profound and humane writer.

Truly magical, and the best of the trilogy.

forest of the pygmies
Forest of the Pygmies
Allende is one of my favourite writers for adult books but i found her series of three childrens books and in browsing them I couldnt put them down myself- so i bought copies for our house for visiting children to read but also sent copies to my neices ( 8 & 10 yrs) who are avid readers, and they can't put them down either. Thank you Isabelle

Not as good as the two previous books in the trilogy
I enjoyed City Of The Beasts and Kingdom Of The Golden Dragon hugely, and this is the third book that follows the story of Alex Cold and his friend Nadia. However, I didn't enjoy it as much as its predecessors. For a start, it was shorter than the other two and lacked a certain magical mystery, that the others had. The flowery description of how every living organism is bound together by a cosmic force was nice to read, but mostly the story felt bland.

What annoyed me about this book the most were the mistranslations and the errors. For a start, the translator had the irritating habit of using 'terrorized' instead of 'terrified'. This quibble sounds pedantic but if you consider the words in context, they actually have quite different meanings and the error was repeated many times during the course of the book. The worst mistake by far is when a crocodile is referred to as an amphibian in the narrative. It's a mistake even a child could spot and I don't see how the translator could have caused it, so it must have been Allende's fault (and her editor's for not spotting it). Perhaps she should do her research more thoroughly?