Happy Times in Noisy Village

Book excerpt: Welcome to Noisy Village! Well, it's not really quite what it sounds. Lisa, who tells the story, lives on Middle Farm with her parents and two brothers, Karl and Bill. Britta and Anna live at North Farm and Olaf and Kerstin live at South Farm. It is because the houses are right next door to each other in a clump as they liked to do these things in rural Sweden years ago, and because the because the children make so much racket that the farmhouses came to be so honestly and happily named. A large linden tree grows between Middle and South Farms and so the boys in the two houses visit each other by climbing through the branches--even the girls do it sometimes, like the night they all waited for Olaf to go to sleep so that they could pull out his loose tooth without his knowing it! That is only one of the many escapades designed to make readers young and old wish they could step right into the pages of this little book. Join the fun in this companion volume to The Children of Noisy Village (published by Viking Penguin). Illustrated with delightful line drawings by Ilon Wikland; translated by Florence Lamborn.