Salem Ridge Press Review

  

Salem Ridge Press is a wonderful publishing company dedicated to bringing back some of the wholesome old living books of the 1800's and early 1900's. I have to admit, I've drooled over their site many times, so I was very excited to receive some of their books.

We were sent Soldier Fritz plus 2 e-books, The American Twins of the Revolution and Mary Jane, Her Visit these books are in the $10-$13 range for the soft cover books.

As we started to read the American Twins book, I realized to my delight, that this was a book by an author that I LOVED as a child. Lucy Fitch Perkins wrote a whole bunch of books about boy-girl twins from all different countries, and when I was a child, I read every one our library had, and LOVED them. I don't remember if I ever read this one or not, but I'm thrilled that this great series is available again for my children to read (and who are we kidding, for me to re-read too!).

Salem Ridge Press is unique (in my experience anyway), in that they make slight edits to both the text and pictures of the books they reprint. These edits keep the books in keeping with good, conservative Christian values, editing out kissing (I assume outside of marriage?), rude dialog, and immodesty and such in pictures. My children are just starting to read books on their own, as long as we were doing all read-alouds, I didn't worry too much, I could "edit" the books as needed while reading them, whether it was changing "millions of years ago" to "thousands of years ago" or skipping over inappropriate scenes, BUT now they're starting to read on their own, I can't begin to tell you what it means to me to know that I don't have to worry about any of that with books from Salem Ridge Press.

The descriptions of the books include a recommended age range and I found that to be pretty accurate for my kids.  Those that are listed for age 8+ required more explanation from me, which is fine, and seems in keeping with being geared for kids a little older than my 7 yr olds. Which reminds me of another great feature of these books!! When the books use unfamiliar language (because of being older books, some terms naturally aren't still used), the editors have included a definition on the same page where the word appears. So convenient to just glance down to the bottom of the page to see what it means, I LOVE that!!!

I was pleased with the quality of the books. They had a nice number of  black and white pictures scattered throughout and the physical book we received seemed to be a good quality paper and as sturdy as would be expected of a paperback book. Obviously, these aren't intended to be handed over to toddlers, but it didn't feel "cheap" to me.

We used these books as read-alouds at bedtime. Which is our main read-aloud time. Our whole family enjoyed the stories (well, Little Bit (18 mo) wasn't overly impressed, but that's to be expected, hee hee). In our house full of girls, DH enjoyed that these weren't as blatantly "girly" as alot of the read-alouds we choose LOL.  The girls enjoyed them, and generally begged for "just one more chapter" I must admit, I obliged them whenever time allowed, because *I* wanted to hear more too, LOL.  We were reading one of the books during a recent trip with my parents, and my dad commented that they might have to stay an extra couple of days so they could hear the rest of the story, so guess the stories appeal to all ages quite well.

This review was written for the TOS Crew.

Disclaimer:
I received the products mentioned above in exchange for writing this review. No other compensation was received, my opinions are my own.