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Rating: 
Summary: This book is great for children learning Latin.
Review: I am a historian who uses Latin on a daily basis -- I learned it the old-fashioned way -- with Wheelock. My son is learning Latin at the sixth-grade level and has made great progress using this series -- which seems to me to be the age level they are best for. If I were teaching high school or college Latin this would NOT be my series of choice. But my son has just finished the first book (I'm buying the second one today for summer study) and has a pretty good knowledge of nouns, adjectives, all four conjugations in the present, future and imperfect tense, some present tense irregular verbs, and knows to be careful with prepositions. He's also got a pretty good understanding of Roman mythology, and domestic life thanks to this series.
Rating: 
Summary: Ok, but difficult to understand without help
Review: I have this book, and it helped me realize that I enjoy Latin. However, the grammar is not explained very well, and I find that I cannot learn a new chapter without guidance from a teacher. Since I live in an area without many Latin teachers, I had difficulty utilizing this book with independent study. However, with a teacher to explain the grammar, this book would be all right. Another problem is that the cartoons at the beginning of each chapter are poorly drawn. Even though this might seem trivial to some, it really does bother me. Personally, I would look for a better text, but this one is OK if you have a teacher.
Rating:
Summary: Malus et Bonus
Review: This book is rather bipolar in its usefullness. It is nice (though often annoying) that it does make things easy on the user by using easy stories. "Quintus goes to the pub" will allow you to concentrate on the language and not the complex meaning of the story. Furthermore, it allows for a sort of "catch up" phase in that every four chapters or so there is a chapter in which nothing new is introduced. A time to really concentrate on what you are suppose to have learned. These are its good points. This will sound trivial but still bothers me a year after having finished this book...the art is wretched. Who drew these pictures? People often are drawn without arms or legs and switch shades of colors between images that are directly beside on another. And never (NEVER) look into the background. Whoever did draw these books not only had little skill in art, but had no knowledge of Roman life. Secondly, the book has this "tell you later" aspect. They allow little things to pop up here and ther and then explain them in the next chapter. Sure, some will say that this is a good way to slowly move into the grammer, but it does you no good to see a word and have no idea whatsoever to do with it. Beyond this, often when they do explain things they do so in a small context. "A" is used for 1. And you shall go on like that for some time before they tell you "A" is used also for 2 & 4, which up until this point we have been using "B." Later, we learn that "B" is the exact same but they cared not to let us in on that little fact. Of course, maybe they don't want to push too much on us, which is a fair argument. But, then, they should put annotations to further chapters so that if we want to we may look further ahead to gain, no understanding, but context. The book also, has its fair share of mistakes, which you will may not realize and which then may really hinder your learning. So, the book has its good and bad points. Overall I think it is a good book to learn with, but it definately could be revised and some of these problems fixed.
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