Mokie & Bik

by Wendy Orr

From Mokie & Bik: Mokie and Bik lived on a boat called Bullfrog. They lived in it, on it, all around it-monkeying up ladders and down ropes, over the wheelhouse and across the cabin floor."Twins!" their mother shouted, because the lines of her Art jiggled and jarred when Mokie and Bik played bumpboats. "Get out from underfoot!"So Bik bumped Mokie out the door-splat!-into nanny Ruby's bucket as she was sploshing the deck."Twins!" shouted Ruby. "Get...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805079793
• ISBN13: 9780805079791
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.6" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 7 to 10 years
• Grade Range: Grades 2 to 5

Customer Reviews

Perfect for elementary-level chapter book readers who like the water.

Mokie and Bik live on a boat called BULLFROG: they live on it and around it and are twins whose parents are busy, so they have a nanny, Ruby. Black and white drawings by Jonathan Bean accompany a fun story of two siblings who love boats: perfect for elementary-level chapter book readers who like the water.

Slippering fisk galavanting about

I credit Wendy Orr with launching the surprise sneak attack of the century. As I write this she is by no means a household name. Her books are distinctly Australian in flavor and tend to span no more than 100 pages apiece. Then 2007 rolls around and BAM! She starts hitting the American market left and right. First her book, Nim's Island gets sold to a big Hollywood studio and will star such luminaries as Jodie Foster. Then the American release of "Mokie and Bik," comes with an uppercut to the jaw. Yankee child audiences'll never know what hit `em. I would like to warn you here and now that upon picking up "Mokie and Bik," your average adult reader is going to have one of two reactions to the writing. Either they are going to embrace Orr's delicious, sing-song use of the English language or they are going to read half a page and disregard it out of cowardice. I'd estimate that a good 25% of the potential adult readership won't have the sheer moxie to read this aloud to their child, and that depresses me. It's been a long time since I've seen an author take such a wild and wonderful chance with words, phrases, definitions, and pronunciations. This isn't a verse novel. It's three times as amusing and creative as that. Mokie and Bik, girl and boy twins, live out their days on their mother's boat, scampering about all the live long day. Their father, to hear them tell it, is a parrot with a pirate who has been out to sea so long they've almost forgotten what he looks like. So while their mother does her Arting and their nanny Ruby fishes them out of the sea by their overalls whenever they tumble in, these two get into trouble faster than a man could blink. Whether they're fishing up "eee-normous fisk", learning to swim (via the old toss-em-in-with-a-rope-around-their-waists method), or walking their saggy soggy dog, these two are making a head-first, devil-may-care, hot-snorting, rip-roaring dive to remain in the pantheon of classic children's literature. And you know what? You'd have a hard time arguing against it. Pure liquid charm, this book. Some twins develop a language entirely of their own, and Mokie and Bik seem to fall smartly into that category. What they say can be deciphered eventually, but it takes some doing. You have to understand what it means when the twins say that their father is a "parrot" who'll come home with "a pirate on his shoulder" and a "treasure on his chest". So what does the book sound like? Here's a taste: "They monkeyed off the roof to the slippery wet deck, slip slide slippering in soggy socks, skate chase racing up to Bullfrog's bow - Mokie was bigger but Bik was faster - and Bik balanced on his sliptoes at the very front point." The spellcheck on my computer is going bonkers over words like "slippering" and "sliptoes" and I wouldn't have it any other way. The water patrols sometimes give the twins, "police cream in a cone." Catching food from the sea is "fisking". The worry here is that Orr would get cutesy on you