Wingfeather Saga Book Club

My boys and I were so invested in this one!  This series is one of our absolute favorites, and we absolutely geek out together over all the details from the books.  We had planned to do the whole series for the book club, which was the first time we tried more than a single book for a club meeting, and it was just a bit much for schedules and such, so we ended up focusing primarily on the first book.  We couldn't help slipping in a few other things for our food and costumes and decorations, but for the activities and discussions, we stuck with the first book.  This was a reread for my older son and me, but my younger son didn't really remember it from before, so it was fun to hear his gasps and have him shout out things he thought as he was drawn in this time.  Both of the boys wanted to make posters for the book club, so while I was reading (or while we listened to the audio book), they were often drawing.

 Here is my younger son's poster:

 

Older brother is obsessed with birds, so younger brother decided to draw the birds from Wingfeather.  Here we have a Lone Fendril, a chorkney, and a snickbuzzard! 

Sea dragon in the harbor at Ban Rona

 We proudly hung up our map of Aerwiar (as well as our Kickstarter posters), and my older son put his poster below it:

The battle of Ban Rona

 All three of us were pretty excited to dress up for this one!  Artham Wingfeather posing with Oskar N. Reteep and Janner Wingfeather as a Durgan Guilding!

 I just had to toss in a few labels for "my" book shop!

My son loves anything resembling a scavenger hunt, so I made one for this book club.  Our housing development has a layout that resembles the shape of the roads on Oskar's map, so I decided to tweak his treasure map to fit with our neighborhood.  I actually had a hard time getting over a few things mentally (seriously, I kept being upset at having Anklejelly Manor on the same corner of the map as the Igiby Cottage!), but it was fun to make a map that looked like Oskar's and had those landmarks but forced the kids to read the map and follow it to find the clues.  

I included comments on the document of how the clues fit together and played out, but here are a few shots from our set-up.

The kids had to throw "stones" to knock out the Fangs at the jail.

I include this one to show that you  have to work with what you've got sometimes--stuffed dinosaur with a bit of gold fabric tied on, in this case, equals a sea dragon (using lots of imagination)! Ha.

The kids had to climb across some bridges to reach Peet's "tree house."

Here is "Peet" in action after delivering the clue to lead to his tree house!  :)

The Jewels

I wrote rules for the game of zibzy!  Yes, I'm the kind of nerd that gets excited about writing rules for a made-up game from a book!  Unfortunately, it had POURED rain, and the field where we would have played was a swampy mess (and the kids were going to be coming back inside my house!), so we didn't get a chance to try it out.  The cover and rules are included in the same doc as the scavenger hunt, so someone will have to let me know if you actually try it!

  The food!  There is SO much good food in these books that I could not possibly put enough to satisfy me in one book club!  We made quite a few other foods throughout the week leading up to the book club, which you can find in my other post about Wingfeather feasting.  Here is our menu for book club:

We basically used the Cheesy Chowder recipe from the Book Club guide at WingfeatherSaga.com but tweaked a bit based on what we have here.  (The recipe is in the kit for the first book.)

I used the recipe from the kit for the second book to make Ronchy McHiggin's Sailor's Pie.

I posted before on how we made Butter Bread.

Since we were focusing primarily on the first book, I decided to try to make some sweets from the Dragon Day festival.  None of the kids, thankfully, ended up covered in blue stickiness like Tink did, but we thoroughly enjoyed Blueberry Gooeyballs and Berry Buns.  I used Alton's Brown's cinnamon roll dough as the base for both.  For the blueberry gooeyballs, I rolled the dough into small balls, put them in the pan, and poured blueberry pie filling over the whole thing (honestly, I would double the amount next time so that they were seriously gooey!).  After baking I poured some glaze over them (made from a bit of cream cheese spread--can't easily get the real stuff here--with icing sugar and a bit of milk and vanilla).  For the berry buns, I made them like cinnamon rolls, but instead of a sugar/cinnamon mix, I put strawberry jam on top of the butter and rolled and cut them like you would cinnamon rolls.  I put a bit more jam on top, baked them, and then poured the glaze on these as well.  

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Beef jerky makes for great "dried diggle."

You have to have bibes for a party!

One of my favorite parts of the day was that, after the kids all went outside after lunch to play, we moms kept discussing the book and had a great time digging into some of the things we encountered in the book and how it affected us deeply.  I love this series so much, and I love having bookish friends!

One other note is that we were able to bring back some Wingfeather treats to share with our friends, and they are delightful!  I absolutely LOVE the patches!  Check out the goodies!