The Journey of Five

by Jenny Phillips, Edward Stevens (Illustrator)

When the river suddenly dries up without explanation and strange soldiers demand gold to make it flow again, the village council chooses a group of five special people to discover who these soldiers are and how they are controlling the flow of water. “These five will journey forth bravely and wisely, representing every person in the land, to discover how we can overcome this challenge without weapons and without war. . . . Our freedom and our way of life will never be the same if this mission does not succeed.”

Genres: Childrens, Fiction

187 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2023

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

As a Christian songwriter and music producer, Jenny Phillips has released over 27 albums and has shared her love of music across the world, speaking at over 1,100 events in 23 countries and selling over a million CDs. In order to reduce the stress and time commitments that naturally come with a music label, and so she could focus more on her young family, Jenny left her music label in 2011. She now offers her music for free on www.hislightmusic.com.

When Jenny's children began going to school, she turned toward another one of her passions—education. Jenny began homeschooling in an effort to provide a faith-based, high-academic education focused on building noble character. Not wholly satisfied with any curriculum she could find and deeply concerned about the loss of good literature in our world, she founded The Good and the Beautiful.

Jenny lives in Utah with her husband and five children. In addition to music, motherhood, and good literature, Jenny loves family history, gardening, traveling, and exercising. She is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but she enjoys working with people of many faiths as she shares her multi-denominational curriculum, rejoicing in the common good that all Christians share.

(from https://www.goodandbeautiful.com/about/)

Reviews

[Megan Giompalo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book for my daughter’s homeschool curriculum! Such a sweet book with fantastic morals and lessons!

[Jenna Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book was very good. I loved the plot twist. - Makai, 8yo

[Nichole · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would give this one star, but I threw an extra one in just because the point of the book is to help with reading.

The Review:

I had two major problems with this book: The characters and the plot. Both were painful.

I’ll start with the characters. They were flat. Boring. The entire book was an endless slog. It’s the perfect example of Mary Sue characters. Even their moments of perfection exist to show how perfect they are. There is zero development. No interest. Nothing. It’s a perfect example of the problems of a plot-driven story.

A plot-driven story—when the plot is the engine to the story instead of the characters and usually at the expense of the characters. That was The Journey of Five. The characters here bend as the plot tells them to bend. The characters are stuck in a cave after an avalanche buried the entrance? No problem. They just happily light two candles and walk through to the other side of the mountain. No problem.

Plot devices in this book just appear at every turn to help the five along whenever they need it. They made the entire book a slog. If it weren’t for the reading practice, we’d have skipped this one for sure.

Then there was the content of the plot.

Here are some of the glaring problems:

-Major rivers cannot just be turned on and off like a faucet in cultures like the one depicted in this story.

-You can’t use a bear hide as a blanket if you only spent a single day preparing it for use, especially if you have no salt. The skin would get hard. Not to mention the ticks, fleas, and smell. I’d rather not go into the smell. This grossed my kids out every time it came up in the book.

-Cutting logs and building a structure resembling a cabin in a cliff side to avoid a little rain when you’re in a hurry to save the lives of villagers is ridiculous. The fact that it happened all in one day was even more so. Keep in mind that they even filled in the chinks of the logs and made it weather-tight all on the same day they constructed a stove of rocks with a surface for cooking and fashioned bowls and utensils. All this while they’re trying to save the village.

-Llamas were not native to medieval cultures seen side-by-side with reindeer. I get this is a children’s fantasy book, but these books are supposed to educate, not misinform. Llamas = South America. Reindeer = Eastern Europe. Big difference.

-Reindeer farmers would not bother building cement roads for their reindeer. Not only that, but cement/concrete wasn’t used until the 1800s.

-And the king. He was born poor but just suddenly was able to get all of these dumb soldiers to come along and build a kingdom for him? Then he just walks away from it to be a story-teller, leaving the power-vacuum behind?? Even the youngest spotted some of those problems. Becoming a just king and teaching his kingdom to be just would have been one thing, but this felt contrived.

I could list more, but I’ll leave it at that. The entire book was a disappointment. She should stick with Timothy of the 10th Floor and leave survival and wilderness stuff alone.

[Patrick S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

What starts out as an interesting plot with a mystery of river water shutting off and an army extorting villages to turn the river water back on - for a time really gets slogged down and loses the plot. Each of the group has their own special ability, even the dog, with the main character Finn having his special ability revealed later in the book. While this is a good plot point and character reveal, the book fails to build up Finn at the beginning of the book to make it known that the leaders who chose him knew about this trait. The story moves along well at first but when it dips into realistic territory of finding food and shelter it really slows to a crawl to become almost a chore to continue. The sidetracks of the five where they help every person on the way adds to the overall plot, however, in the context of the motivation of the characters these actions would be dooming their villagers they're suppose to be helping. The story picks back up towards the end with some good reveals and an excellent lesson on the Christian message of standing in the place of guilty people. However, the plot doesn't do enough to earn that lesson other than the character just wants to help the clearly guilty and bad guys. Overall, the beginning and end are well-written and makes you care about each of the characters. The ending sums up everything nicely, although a bit too simplistic to reach a "happily ever after" end. But that middle part of the book was a journey in and of itself. Final Grade - C

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. My daughter loved how the ending tied together, and we loved swapping pages. I absolutely loved how this book taught the importance of honesty and kindness, but also introduced a moral grey. My daughter is entering her preteen years and starting to learn that not everything is written in black and white. Without giving away spoilers, there was an instance when the main character acknowledged that honesty is important, but the situation didn't seem like a safe time to share the truth-- and later again, characters were careful to keep their truth to themselves around a character they didn't trust.
This led to a wonderful discussion about how telling the truth and not keeping secrets usually keeps us safe, but there are extreme situations where we have to use our best judgement. An example we pulled from history was the holocaust when good, honest people were forced to keep secrets, lie, and steal in order to help save an oppressed people. It's really weird to open that discussion with a child (who i hope turns into an honest adult), but I'm glad this book presented the opportunity.
This is a great feel-good book that is formatted to encourage trading off reading between parent and child

[Cat Denmark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I've ever read, and I've read a lot of very good books! In Journey of Five, we go on an adventure with Finn, a 14 year old boy, and 4 other companions to solve a problem for their village. I love how it has to do with God and the analogy of the red diamond to Jesus paying the debt for our sins. I enjoyed learning new survival skills, and I love how the book had suspense. While reading the pieces of the story, you don't realize until the end how they all go together and how God put the pieces together for the Journey of Five to save the village's water. I liked that the Five never really got down. They had faith the whole time that God would help them. I really liked how brave Finn was at the end. He grew in confidence and faith from beginning to end. -9yo reviewer

[Chloe (Always Booked) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot. It's ht 4th book we've read for my daughter's 3rd grade language arts curriculum. The book is about 5 people who are randomly selected to go stop a group of soldiers that are controlling the water supply and making life impossible for the community. One of the people we follow is Finn, a young boy who has a turned in foot. He feels unworthy but starts to realize that he is still valuable and important, despite his disability. The gang runs into a lot of people on their journey from injured soldiers, random folks, etc. They practice kindness and being the hands and feet of Jesus multiple times, even when its hard and may be dangerous for them. It was a sweet, adventurous book that we enjoyed!

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book with my son for his schoolwork. It was a good book with a good story and a good message. She was always excited to hear what happened next each chapter started with a short grammar lesson which was very helpful.

Here’s his review of the book:
This book was a really good book. You first find that no one knows anything about the river drying up and you don’t know the main character until the end. In the end, everything works out. The cool thing is that I started this book before Christmas and ended it at almost the end of January. My favorite part is when you find out what is Finn’s gift or talent, it is storytelling and with his stories he changes a king’s mind without fighting that’s the true power of gifts. That’s my life lesson from this book.

[Gloria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think these books. This one I didn't see how the author was going to pull it all together at the end, but she did in a satisfactory way. A few loose ends to my adult mind, but the boy thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Rowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Lara Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another sweet Good & the Beautiful book to read with Henry

[Bethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

My son loves the twists in this book. We also liked how it showed with difficulties you can still do hard things!

[Victoria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall, this story was ok. I liked the other books in the Level 3 curriculum much better.

[Nicole Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably my favorite of the four books in the level 3 series.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for T's language arts for 3rd grade. We enjoyed it enough to read it much faster than we were supposed to because T needed to know what was going to happen next!

[Kristen DeChaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

My 9 year old absolutely loved this book!

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read-aloud with R. Sept. '25
A wonderful story, very heartwarming

[Aisley Faust · Rating 5 out of 5]

Follow along on this amazing adventure with a group of 4 friends and 1 dog. This excursion entails many good things such as service, mercy, and heartfelt kindness. I really love this book a lot and am so grateful for beautiful books like this one that are whole some and altogether uplifting and inspiring.

[Autumn Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book because all of all the ideas they have and of the ways they get out of tight spots. I especially liked that they did construction for shelter. The reason why I rated it 4 stars is because it ended really fast and that they don’t figure out where the red dimond came from. (By- E Jackson)