The Mystery at Walt Disney World

Rating:
Summary: A GREAT BOOK WITH LOADS OF DISNEY INFORMATION!!!!
Review: (...) This was a fabulous book. It is basically an educational piece disguised as a mystery. It seems that Ms. Marsh wants to find an entertaining way of presenting facts. Even though she set a mystery at Disney World and entertwined the facts behind the Magic Kingdom with a kidnapping plot, there is never any real menace felt. This is exactly the type of thing that I liked to read when I was a kid. My four year old loved it, and we will use it to prepare for our next trip to the magic kingdom. I just hope that Ms. Marsh will follow through with writing novels for the rest of the theme parks. I highly recommend this book for students and teachers (try to find the teacher's guide edition). This was a great book for those who like a little mystery and a lot of great information. I will definitely buy the other books in this series.

Rating:
Summary: A GREAT BOOK WITH LOADS OF DISNEY INFORMATION!!!!
Review: (...) This was a fabulous book. It is basically an educational piece disguised as a mystery. It seems that Ms. Marsh wants to find an entertaining way of presenting facts. Even though she set a mystery at Disney World and entertwined the facts behind the Magic Kingdom with a kidnapping plot, there is never any real menace felt. This is exactly the type of thing that I liked to read when I was a kid. My four year old loved it, and we will use it to prepare for our next trip to the magic kingdom. I just hope that Ms. Marsh will follow through with writing novels for the rest of the theme parks. I highly recommend this book for students and teachers (try to find the teacher's guide edition). This was a great book for those who like a little mystery and a lot of great information. I will definitely buy the other books in this series.

Rating:
Summary: A dangerous book for kids to read--unsettling for adults too
Review: As Disney World fans, we just read this book together as a family. We never would have read it if we had guessed where the plot was headed. The author's appalling concept is that there is a gang of professional kidnappers loose in the Magic Kingdom who manage to pick off three of the four youthful protagonists in the book and sequester them in the "Disney Family" apartment at the top of Cinderella's Castle. Ultimately a total of 13 kids are kidnapped. The book sets a perverse example for kids--each time one of the protagonists is kidnapped, the remaining kids never make an attempt to contact authorities, and instead go off and have tacos or line up for other Magic Kingdom rides. With that kind of cavalier attitude conveyed by the author, we figured the whole thing would turn out to be a dream, or that the kids themselves were pretending to be kidnapped as a practical joke (still perverse, but not as horrific as their really being kidnapped). Unbelievably, the "climax" reveals that 13 kids are actually abducted and sobbing behind a locked door on Disney property where they are being held for ransom!!! How the abductors plan to "dispose" of the abductees ON DISNEY PROPERTY is never specified. We had never before observed life sentence material in a children's book! We can't believe Disney hasn't sued the pants off of Carole Marsh for planting this paranoid fantasy in the minds of youthful vacationers. Not to mention grammatical errors, typos, insipid plugs for "Carole Marsh fan club mystery watches," and every type of self-indulgence that the author can muster. If this book only reflected fatuousness and bad taste it would be just be a campy groaner--as it is, it is almost a criminal misrepresentation to children of how to respond approprately and safely if there is a kidnapper on the loose. Jeffrey Dahmer would have approved. Carole Marsh should realize the damage she is doing to kids everywhere with this kind of malignant role modelling. Meanwhile, the publishers should voluntarily withdraw this book from circulation, permanently.