Delicious Reads: Book Review for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" {by Washington Irving}

Friday, October 21, 2016

Book Review for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" {by Washington Irving}

TITLE OF THE BOOK: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

AUTHOR: Washington Irving

PUBLISHER: multiple

NUMBER OF PAGES: 53

YEAR PUBLISHED: 1820

READING LEVEL: appropriate for teens and adults

GENRE: Classic/Gothic Fiction/Short Story/Speculative Fiction

BOOK SUMMARY:

The Headless Horseman haunts Sleepy Hollow. An outsider named Ichabod Crane moves to Tarry Town, where he tries to marry the daughter of the richest man in town. He's driven out of Sleepy Hollow by the Headless Horseman.

OUR STAR RATING:

2.8 stars

OUR GROUP REVIEW:

I think most of us at Delicious Reads were surprised by The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Though many members had heard certain versions on the story, few of us had actually read it. We all were expecting a scary story, but it turned out to be more of a comical story than we imagined . . . and much shorter than the books we usually read.

Before we took a quiz (which was hard! Shame on you, Whitney), our moderator split us into two teams to play Story Round-Robin. Each person on the team was given the chance to write two sentences to add to a "scary story" that we passed around. Once everyone finished writing their sentences, we headed out to Whitney's back yard and sat around the fire. It was cold outside, so this was the perfect moment to have the fire warm us up while we read aloud the stories each group wrote and voted on our favorite. The finished stories were comical!

Whitney told us how The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is really the first story written about the headless horseman and how most other stories featuring this character stem from this one (especially the idea of a pumpkin head).

We all decided that we thought the purpose of this book was for humor and entertainment, not for scaring. Because the end of the story doesn't come straight out and say that Bram Bones was the Headless Horseman (though it definitely alludes to it), we discussed what we thought about him. A few of the girls thought Bram reminded them of Gaston (from Beauty & the Beast). I think that is spot on: