When my then nine-year-old son on the autism spectrum moved into chapter books, it presented a bit of a challenge to find something that interested him.  I tried books in various series that we picked up at the bookstore, but nothing seemed to keep his attention until we stumbled across the Magic Tree House series.

When we first found them, I wasn’t aware that they were a sequential series.  Each of the books does stand on their own to a degree, but there is something of an ongoing story.  Once my son had a solid interest in the series, I began filling in the gaps of the books we were missing.  Before then, we were just picking out the stories that interested him,

Mummies in the Morning is the third book in the series.  Jack and Annie are brothers and sisters who live in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania.  Jack is eight and Annie is seven.  They found the Magic Tree House in the woods near their home and have been on two adventures so far.

This time, Jack and Annie find a book about ancient Egypt and wish themselves back in time.  The tree house lands in a palm tree next to a giant pyramid.  As they follow a mysterious black cat Jack and Annie find themselves helping an Egyptian queen locate the items she needs to travel to the next life.

Mummies in the Morning was an easy read.  I read it in a few minutes at the bookstore before deciding to bring it home.  My son reads these generally now in an afternoon.  The book is just 62 pages long and divided into chapters.  They keep his attention and he enjoys reading the story over and over again.

The story itself is good.  It creates a good amount of suspense without making it overly dramatic or putting Jack and Annie in too much peril.  They come across as curious kids who are on an adventure.  Annie is a bit more adventurous than Jack.  Still, Annie does exhibit some fear this time around in the face of the ghost of the Egyptian queen.

Yes, there is a ghost in this and reverence for others beliefs.  Mummies in the Morning gives details of Egyptian burial rituals and their beliefs in what happens after they die.  There is also information about how they buried their dead inside pyramids and a pretty detailed description of a rotting mummy.  My son thought it was “cool” and wasn’t bothered by the description at all.

Jack and Annie do encounter tomb robbers, but this encounter is brief and doesn’t really put them in peril.  Their greatest peril comes from getting lost inside the pyramid.

The biggest issue I have with Mummies in the Morning is the sentence structure and poor grammar.  I have noticed this quite a bit in earlier books in the series and it does seem to improve as the series goes on.  Here is an example of a paragraph about the cat Jack and Annie encounter:

It was the strangest cat Jack had ever seen.  He was very sleek and dark.  With bright yellow eyes.  And a wide gold collar.

There were many more examples like that.  I was bothered by the fact that the kids would read this and think this is proper sentence structure.  The book is a good length to read out loud to a child at bedtime, but how can you read sentences like that out loud?  I tried and it doesn’t really flow nicely.  I found myself starting and stopping in odd places and my own distraction in trying to read the story as it’s been printed meant that the story didn’t come across well.

I like how Mummies in the Morning emphasizes the facts in the book.  Like other books in the series, Jack carries around his notebook and writes down important things he and Annie learn.  There’s also a bit more revealed surrounding the mysterious “M” that Jack and Annie believe is the owner of the tree house and the books in it.

While I liked the story quite a bit and my son found it enjoyable to read, I have reservations about this book.  I think it’s a bad idea to present a book with such poor grammar for kids to read and hold up as the ideal.  I do like that it held my son’s attention and he looked forward to reading it.  The books are on his shelf and he chooses ones that interest him for repeated reading.  This is one I’ve seen him with a few times.