Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Guinea Pigs Online: Furry Towers

Author: Jennifer Gray, Amanda Swift

Narrator: Oliver Hembrough

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 26 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-17-15

Publisher: Quercus

Genres: Kids, Ages 5-7

Publisher's Summary:

Furry Towers promises the best food and fabulous facilities for guinea pigs - Fuzzy and Coco are so excited! But when they arrive, the friends find themselves in a smelly old hutch with only moldy lettuce to eat. Coco is not impressed! And it soon becomes clear that something terribly sinister is going on at Furry Towers - can the friends save the day again?

Members Reviews:

Five Stars

For my guinea pig-loving granddaughter--she loves these books!

A Gripping Adventure, With A Few Laughs, for Your Early Reader

This book is great fun. Coco and Fuzzy, (who are guinea pigs), talk, scheme, adventure, surf the internet, and exchange dry and pithy bon mots. Fuzzy is tech savvy; Coco is a bit posh because she once belonged to the Queen. What's not to love? It's as though a slightly smarter Bertie Wooster and Jeeves ate mostly lettuce and lived in a hutch in your bedroom. (Anyway, when I read that the two visited a social networking site called "Micespace" I knew I was going to like this author.)

In this episode of the Coco and Fuzzy series, (number two of at least four "Guinea Pigs Online" books), the two guinea pigs are deposited at Furry Towers, a supposedly elegant pet hotel, while their owners go out of town. Furry Towers is a dump and a front for shady dealings, and Coco, Fuzzy and their fellow prisoners have to plan a break out. The story partly runs as a goof on the movie "The Great Escape", which is pretty sly for a kid's book.

A number of interesting secondary characters complement our two heroes. My favorite was Edouardo the macho Andean Agouti guinea pig, who lives in the thicket behind the yard and harasses the foxes. There are a few regulars from book to book and then a few guest characters in each individual book so there is a lot of variety. And these characters have well defined, engaging and individual presences, which is sort of amazing for an early reader book, when you think about it.

The writing is very accomplished. There is never a hint of condescension, and the author clearly has a lot of respect for her kid readers. The descriptions and the plotting are neither too thin nor belabored, so that the story moves along at a nice pace but never loses the reader. The whole thing feels light and airy, but there is a lot of craft at work under the surface. As Coco might say, "One appreciates the effort".

It seems this would be a fun read-to; I can imagine hamming it up a bit, using different voices for the two heroes as I read this out loud. It would also work as an independent read, as it seems that it would be quite manageable, (maybe with a little help here and there), for the target interest/reading level young readers.

So, a nice find that adds some gentle good humor to the early reader category, and introduces two very amiable and appealing heroes. Worth a close look for sure. (Please note, while I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)