Okay. I give up. Magic Tree House wins. I was wrong to fight it. Tonight Benny cried, yes cried real actual tears, over the fact that we'd accidentaly left the house without the book he was reading. And this was not an Eyewitness book about space, or a Q&A book about African animals, or a Bill Nye study on germs. It was a story, with a plot about people, an actual work of fiction. Up until he read Magic Tree House #1, he had been interested in exactly ZERO novels. Science books, yes. Stories, no. This is a kid who will read high school textbooks on geology and stay up all night doing it. But he would not read... Redwall, or Henry Huggins, or Moomins, or anything ridiculous like that. Now, he cannot be separated from his Magic Treehouse So, I guess I am convinced.

I picked up a Magic Tree House a few years ago -- it was #16 I think: The Hour of the Olympics. I got it, with some other books, to read during the 2004 Olympic Games, and I was disappointed because of all this strange, unexplained stuff about Morgan Le Fay, and irritated by the kind of facile, flatly rendered treatment of the material. Benny didn't give a ripe fig about the book, and I put it down with a sneer, deciding it was the literary equivalent of visiting the World Lagoon at Epcot Center and deciding you'd seen Europe.

That was also before I'd been to Disney World and realized it was fun to go to the Epcot World Lagoon and pretend Peru was next to Hungary and watch fireworks. So okay! I didn't get it. I didn't get the fact that the books are *not* entirely episodic, there are longer plots and mysteries that span multiple novels. Also, there are "Research Guides" that go along with the books, so you can read what the main characters are reading, and see what informs their adventures. What I mostly didn't get was that my child would be charmed by the stories, would be drawn in by the plots -- and really, as long as he's finally reading fiction, what right do I have to complain?

I asked him, "Benny, what are you going to do when you run out of Magic Treehouse books?" and he replied, "I guess I'm going to have to find some other kind of storybook to read!" Any suggestions for what makes a good transition for a non-novel-reader who might just want to finally read a novel?