Detecting the future - Rated 
This is a subtle and careful book that also is able to make some very good points. The boys in the story live in Nazi Germany before the war breaks out. They are just boys hanging together (in the same class....) and facing a thief that steals but belongs to another world and another class, but not a school class...
Read it with Treblinka and Leningrad and the battle for Berlin 15 years later on the same streets at the back of your mind. Where were Emile and his friends during those days...if they survived that long....see the Eidelwise Piraten resistence movement.
Simple fun - just like children's games - Rated
I don't know how many times I have read this book. I read it first when I was about 9 or 10, and though the title has been clearly lodged in my memory, I keep forgetting what the book is about. So I bought a copy though I'm well past being a child.
'Emil and the Detectives' shows what Kastner is all about. The plot is simple, but at the same time well-set, characters are fun and unique, the dialogue quite witty, and the message ever so clear. This is his most practical, simple, and easy-read at best. I also love his 'Flying Classroom' and 'Parent Trap', but this book, while aimed at slightly younger audience, also has the quintessential simplicity and characters we can warm to in big helpings.
The only disappointing thing is that it is perhaps too thin a book for these detectives and Emil.
read these books, u and yr children wont be able to stop! - Rated
One man said: "when people is growing up they through thier childhood out like an old hat". Erich Kastner is the man who has keeped the childhood in himself.
His books are interesting for all ages - from 8 till 80! He is the great story-teller, he is able to see uncommoness in common things, he speaks interesting with big humor.
Just read these books, u and yr children wont be able to stop!
He wrote 15 books, the most famouse are Emil...,Double Lotthen, Annaluisa and Anton, the 35 of may, when I was little, the flying class , 2 books about the boy from match box
A First Class Book! - Rated
I first read this book in Primary School in the 1950s and when my local library disposed of its' copy in the 1980s I bought it for my son. I am pleased to see that it is still available. It was, and still is, an exciting story for the young and the not-so-young!
Classic - Rated
I had to review this to bump up the star rating; so long as it has its original illustrations, this is a classic suspense tale for young readers, in which the atmosphere of pre-war working class Germany is powerfully evoked. Or are today's kids too sophisticated? Suffice it to say that no film (no English language film, anyway) could do this story justice.
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