Jack and Annie have arrived at the Magic Tree House to visit their friend Morgan le Fay, only to find Morgan gone but a stray mouse running around, the only clue to her whereabouts a half scrawled "Help Me" note suggesting that she's been cursed. The note starts to say that they need to find four things but then cuts off with no mention of what those four things might be. Jack and Annie search the tree house and find an open book about ninjas, which they take for the first thing they need to work on to find out what happened to Morgan.

Annie grabs up Peanut, the name she affectionately gave the stray mouse, and wishes they could go where the Ninjas are; the next thing you know, the magic tree house has whisked Jack and Annie to ancient Japan.

Jack cautions Annie that they need to sit down and learn more about ninjas before running out into the night to find them. While studying facts about them, Annie realizes that the ninjas have already found and entered the tree house to capture them.

Though they speak not a word, they do listen to the children explain who they are and that they are trying to help their friend Morgan. The ninjas seem to understand what they are saying and gesture for them to follow. Jack thinks it would be prudent to have the tree house take them back home, but Annie believes they can help find the remaining clues to release Morgan from her curse, so decides that they need to go with the ninjas.

Thus begins their exciting adventure.

My seven-year-old granddaughter and I read this book together and we both liked the adventure parts of the story. The graphics and character expressions are well-done and nicely colored in places. I know that a good portion of the book takes place at night but, if you aren't sitting under a bright light to read, many of the pages are extremely dark and make it hard to see what's going on in the story.

I didn't realize when we started the book that it was a chapter series, so when we got to the end with the story still unresolved, my granddaughter was a little let down. Hopefully she'll want to continue the adventure with the next book, to find out if they help Morgan end her curse. ~~ ~  Dee Astell & Paisley Hernandez