The House With Chicken Legs Hardcover – September 25, 2018

This was an enjoyable fast read.I know next to nothing about Russian Folklore. I really enjoyed the Baba Yaga and how they help the dead cross over. The way in which the Baba Yaga go about doing what is there calling is unique to me.Along with the Baba Yaga is her granddaughter, Marinka. She is to be the next Baba Yaga, but all she wants is to make friends and to stay in one place. While there were times in this that I found Marinka bratty, overall I enjoyed her journey.The House had its own personalty and other fantastical elements that added to the atmosphere. The House took Baba Yaga and Marinka to different and exotic locations, where Baba Yaga was needed to help the dead pass over. The locations were beautifully described creating the atmosphere throughout the book.I recommend this book, it shows the journey of how someone who wants something so badly and what they will do to achieve that something, only to find out what they already have is something special.

My 6th grade students reading below grade level loved this book. It was intriguing and dealt with the conflict that many children go through as they get older. Bonus that it did not look like a much easier reading level than their peers!

I’m a 5th grade teacher and I CANNOT wait to share this with my students next year!!I usually read YA realistic fiction so jumping into the myth genre was something new for me. Let me just say, this heart-wrenching tale will stay with me for a long time!Marinka’s character is very emotional and even unlikable at times. But her thoughts and actions are so realistic while coping with such complex concepts like death, loneliness and destiny.The imagery and figurative language created by Sophie Anderson throughout this novel is moving and so so beautiful. I will use this over and over again in my classroom!

A book of mixed emotions, wanting to belong, confidence, loneliness and defiance. All this is tackled from a young person's perspective in this unusual story. It was well written and an enjoyable easy to read book. I would recommend this book

A reimagining of one of my favorite fairytales. Vasilisa the Wise would be cheering on Sophie for giving us a Baba for today. Wonderfully imaginative. Play a recording of Pictures at an Exhibition, serve up some borscht and black bread, and settle in for a whopping good tale.

I'm reading this with my 9 yr old who struggles to get into reading. He loves this book so much that we end up reading multiple chapters a day because he doesn't want to stop.

I loved this book. It was a different take on the baba yaga tradition in fairy tales/folk tales...with a cool ending.....

I liked it as I'm a sucker for Baba Yaga. It was a good read and decent story with a lot of Russian terms explained through out. It's a good chapter book for a young reader.

I read this book with my 8 year old and we absolutely adored it. The idea of living in a house with chicken legs which picks itself up and runs around the world while you sleep at night is so lovely and really sparks the imagination but there are a host of real life lessons to be learned here too - not to take your loved ones for granted, that the pretty girls are not always the nice girls and that the grass is almost certainly not greener on the other side. The house with chicken legs left us with the most glorious book hangover (where you're not ready for the story to end) and we've been crafting our own little house with chicken legs from a little bird house and some fimo. I can't wait until Sophie releases another.

After hearing a short reading at a book festival, I immediately downloaded the book on Kindle and could not put it down until the very last page. The story is unusual and surprisingly tender and magical. Sophie Anderson is a gifted author, breathing life into her lovely characters of Baba and the delightful wayward Marinka, but with a stroke of genius, the true heroine is the House. Sophie has taken a folk tale with a very difficult subject for children and adults, and woven her magic of words and tenderness around it.

I definitely avoided picking this one up, despite all the rave reviews I'd read and heard, and a bookseller I trust telling me I absolutely must read it. I'm a bit of a fool really because this book was brilliant. My reasons were that I'd never read a book I'd really enjoyed that centres around Russian mythology, and this book is very much grounded in it, but now I'm very sure that says a lot more about the other books I've read than the subject matter. This book was wonderful and every bit as magical as promised.Marinka lives with her grandmother, Baba Yaga, in a house that can't keep itself still for long, and travels the world on its long chicken legs. The house itself has remarkable sentience that has allowed it to be Marinka's friend and playmate for most of her childhood, but now she's older, she longs for a real-life living human friend, and to settle down in one place so she can do all the kinds of things normal kids do.For at least the first half of this book Marinka drove me crazy. She's a very selfish character who makes a lot of very stupid, selfish mistakes, but despite how infuriating she was at times, her selfishness is one of the things that made her feel so very real to me. It made perfect sense for her to be like that, having never really had real friends, having been coddled by Baba Yaga for much of her life, and from being so desperately confused about herself and what she wants from life. Marinka's flaws were etched very deeply into her character and behaviour right from the start, but her journey is one of the most interesting I've seen in a middle-grade book in several years. You can really see her learning and changing; her emotions ebb and flow (like all children's) and she has to learn how to process and understand so much so fast. By the end of the book, Marinka is a very different person, and I loved that transformation and going on that journey with her.The world of the Yagas was intriguing and beautifully evoked, with very immersive and visual writing. The world felt so much larger and richer than just the small bits of it we saw, with a long implied history that was often hinted at. This world felt fully-realised. The only thing that dropped this down from 5 stars was that I think Marinka needed to have some redeeming qualities a little earlier because I'm not sure she should have been so unlikable for most of the first half. But her transformation is wonderful and this book truly is brilliantly twisty and full of the unexpected.

My son has just finished reading 'The Girl Who Speaks Bear' and started this book. I bought this for him after reading such good reviews. Now, if I tell you that my son is a typical little boy (13 yrs old) and needs a crowbar to lever him from his mobile or Playstation, you'd be surprised to know that he couldn't wait to start reading this and was naughty enough to start it in bed last night after lights out and continued this morning to page 50.I think (although early days) this is going to be an addictive read for him. So, I have no option but to rate this book 10 out of 5 ;-)

One of my favourite lines (among many) in Sophie’s book is ‘...the morning is always wiser than the evening’. This echoes ‘clever, stubborn, and fiery’ Marinka’s journey. Her decisions, which may not always be the right ones, sometimes weigh heavy like a dark night with their consequences. But as she struggles to figure everything out, there is a clarity as clear as morning. All with the help of the wonderful house.This book deserves all the praise that has been showered on it. The writing is stunning, dealing with light and dark themes, and overall a feeling of hope. I loved Marinka’s voice, and the descriptions of Russian food are good enough to fill your nostrils.By the end you’ll want a Jackdaw that tucks bread in your socks, and a house with chicken legs to take you over the mountains.