Family Book Club: The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw

Last night we had our Family Book Club for the book The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw by Christopher Healy. This is the third and final (maybe?) book of the Hero's Guide series. It is such a fun series! It is basically the adventures of the Princes' Charming in the the stories of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. A great book for showing unique characters which lends itself to lots of fun voices (if you get into that like I do!) My kids especially liked my Smimf voice (teenage boy with a voice that has a tendency to crack,) Briar Rose (the mean girl, snobby voice,) Gustav (the dumb jock,) Frederic (the very formal, sophisticated prince who doesn't like to get dirty,) and of course Duncan (the airhead.)

Since life is crazy right now with the end of summer, one final trip to pack for, Lexi's birthday party to plan, and getting ready to go back to school next Monday, I decided to go easy on myself for book club. So we just had a great themed dinner at The Stumpy Boarhound (the bar that is the meeting place for the League of Princes) and chatted about the book while we ate. We had a baguette (okay, so it's a loaf of french bread because Fresh Market didn't have a baguette) because one of the new characters is a girl the princesses meet in prison named Val Jean Val who gets thrown into jail for stealing a baguette and then beating up 15 guards with it! (Sounds suspiciously like a character named Jean Val Jean in Les Miserables, eh?!) Lexi and Tyson were happy to act out that scene for us!

We drank blue sprite because there are two Sprites in the book that are Rapunzel's little friends. We had to drink them out of our bar mugs because we were at the Stumpy Boarhound, of course.

 And we had fried chicken, which I'm not sure was actually mentioned in the book, but seems like something they would have had. Zac was showing me how to eat it like Gustav. We also ate crab salad because Gustav is allergic to seafood.

For dessert we ate Trolli Octopuses and Sharks because in the book their ship is attacked by a giant sea monster.

I would definitely recommend this series. They aren't super high in teaching a moral lesson, aside from friendship and cooperation I guess,  but they are funny and exciting and the kids love them. The titles of each chapter are fun too because they are always misleading. It is sometimes a bit difficult to read aloud because Healy LOVES alliteration, but that makes it kind of fun too. Just don't forget to do the voices, you'd be doing your kids a serious disservice if you don't! I think we are now going to move onto something a little more serious, maybe Walk Two Moons?