I read this book to my daughter for bedtime stories and she absolutely loved it. Elizabeth, the protagonist is a strong female character that my daughter could really connect with. Gaia, a personified otter (and, well, Gaia), creates great conflict by pitting Elizabeth between her need to live a quiet life on a small family farm and the Gaia's need for her to step up and fight the large corporate pig farm which is damaging the earth. Welles, does a nice job creating a magical world based within

Fantastic first book in the Gaia Girls series, which will eventually be SEVEN books (though at this rate my daughter will outgrow them before they're all published - boo hoo!)The story is full of adventure and magic and intrigue, while teaching the reader (both subtly and not-so-subtly) tips for taking care of our precious earth. There is urgency and conflict and disaster and tragedy - difficult subjects are not sugar-coated, but addressed with realism and honesty. This book is PERFECT for kids

What an amazing book! It inspires an attitude of respect, understanding, and love for the earth and also educates about things like how an organic farm works, how everything in a garden helps it grow, and how big animal farms are harmful! I love this book! It is definitely not just for kids. I can't wait to read the others in the series.

This book is awesome...I even met the author and she was really cool..very true to saving our worl and i respect that a great deal...Defentily one to read..it's a quick read also .. For ANY ages

This was interesting..... but didn't actually catch my attention..... but I will be reccomending it!

all the people who care about the enviroment should read this!!

I found a pristine copy of this book in a thrift store. kGaia; Mother Earth for youths? Cool! I would have loved to read this when I was younger, and I thought it may be a good story to pass on to my niece. Reading exposed me to so many ideas and fantasies as a child and young adult. I read about thieves, abusers, selfish characters who ruined others' lives for their own gain. I read about the suffering of others and the ways they over came it. I read about beautiful places, moments and works of...

Bought book #2 first - because of the cover..backed up and found book #1...for young readers (and old) the beginning of a series of environmentally focused super-kids. The Earth book takes you to a farm in upstate NY and the evils of Corporate farming. Lizzy has the power to hear the land/trees/dirt/ and learns to harness her power for good with the help of neighbor boy Will. It was an excellent way to deliver environmental choices to kids without being preachy or overbearing. Coming from a plac...

When her family's farm is threatened by a corporate farming operation, Elizabeth discovers that she's uniquely suited to save the day. I wasn't thrilled with this one at first, but it grew on me. There's some action just past the midway point that I found particularly well written. It has a similar feel and themes as The Overstory by Richard Powers but for a middle-grade audience, and would be great as part of a family reading crate (like Emily Cook at Build Your Library used to offer).Having sa...

Amazing story about a little girl on a farm who wants to savre the earth with her new friend Gaia. The earth took the body of an otter! Still waiting for book 3!

What a delightful book! I'm looking forward to the next one.

Read many years ago. I am now reading with my daughter. I love the super earth saving powers young girl characters have in these books.

I really enjoyed this. I gave the book four stars despite one big problem I had with it. I can dismiss the issue since it is a novel directed at children and young adults - admittedly it provides a wonderful set of environmental ethics and has a certain Carson-esque (Rachel Carson - Silent Spring) theme to it. That is, all of nature is a part of a greater system of ecology. You ruin one little part of it, and really the whole thing can go to hell. The analogy of the little toe that Welles create...

3.5 stars --The GAIA GIRLS series is off to a promising start. It's more intelligent and better written than most adventure stories aimed toward the upper elementary/middle school audience, and young readers may learn something to boot.Elizabeth is a true country girl--growing up on her parents' organic produce farm, she has learned to listen to and respect the earth. Now, the earth is asking for her help. A factory hog operation called "Harmony Farms" is buying up land around their farm, and El...

I wanted to fall in love with this book and I was honestly expecting to so I'm sad that I didn't really enjoy it. This is a book geared towards older children that features a young girl working together with the earth in order to stop a factory farm (more specifically a pig farm) from buying up all the neighbour farms and being built next door to their own farm. It sounded amazing and wonderful and I love that such a book exists for the younger crowd, but.... I didn't particularly like it myself...

Enter the Earth is the story of Elizabeth Angier, a 9 year old girl living on a farm in Upstate New York. When her family farm is threatened by a CAFO (factory farm), Elizabeth encounters Gaia, in the form of an otter, and is given unique powers that she can use to help save both her farm and Gaia herself.This was a fast moving story, and I enjoyed it as an adult. I did have some problems with it though. It was written in the stilted manner of books aimed at 8-10 year olds, but the language and

Elizabeth is excited that fourth grade is almost over and she’ll soon be able to hang out for lazy days on her farm with her best friend Rachel. She knows there will also be lots of work to do, but she loves her family’s land and the way her parents care for it. She’s always felt a close connection to the things that grow there.But Elizabeth’s idyllic summer is not to be, as she discovers Rachel is moving away and a large corporation that runs giant pig farms is buying up nearby land to turn int...

I read this story to my daughter as of bedtime story. She she really enjoyed it and thought it was extremely well-written. She is very into the environment and so enjoyed it because Elizabeth, the main character, lives on a farm and is very tuned in to her surroundings.

If you are a supporter of the local food movement or sustainable agriculture and opposed to industrially raised food than you will probably like this book and suggest it to your preteen daughter. If you think that whole line of thinking is a bunch of bunk than you will not likely enjoy the book. The premise of the book involves the consciousness of the earth presenting herself to a girl and gives the girl powers to help save the earth from destructive environmental practices. The girl uses these...

Gaia Girls: Enter The Earth is a tale of a ten year old girl named Elizabeth who has to fight against a huge cooperation to save her families farm with an interesting entity called Gaia. With the help of Gaia, Elizabeth discovers she has unique abilities, such as listening and moving Earth. Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth as won National Outdoor Book Award (2006), iParenting Media Award (2007), Independent Publishers Award. Use the GA standard ELAGSE4RL3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or ev...

I had such high hopes for this because of the premise: A girl lives on a family farm and a factory farming corporation moves in and starts buying nearby farms. But I did not enjoy the writing at all.The plot seemed to move very slowly. One reason for that might be that at the beginning, there were a lot of "backstory breaks" -- paragraphs of flashback or explanation -- that interrupted the flow. I was always being told how the character felt after everything that happened, rather than her reacti...

Love that this kind of story dealing with environmental stewardship and harmful agricultural practices is available to kids. We need more books like this. While some folks may be skeptical with the way the Earth is presented as a living being in this book,as a deep ecologist and believer in the Gaia Hypothesis I'm on board. No matter what you believe, I think it's important to consider that humans may not be the "top" of the food chain/ecosystem, just a dominant part of it, and can put our intel...

This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. It reminds me of my own childhood growing up rurally loving nature. Climbing trees, swimming till I could see rainbows in my blurry eyes, collecting rocks, kissing frogs, picking wild blackberries along the buggy corn fields on a muggy July morning - all these memories and so many more came flooding back to me as I read Enter the Earth. I found tears of nostalgia running down my cheeks, and I felt a joy and peace that someone could put all

I could not recommend this book more. I'd love to see it be required reading for forth graders everywhere and even better if families read it together. But it's not just for kids. The message in this book is important for adults to hear as well. My personal view of Gaia is a little different than that portrayed in the book but my feelings on the importance of caring for the earth through considering all our actions, from what we eat to what we buy and how we live is in full agreement with this b...

What an inspiring book! Negative reviewers have bashed it for preachily espousing an earth-reverent lifestyle of environmental conservation. The heroine fights the establishment of a factory farming pig enterprise in her neighborhood and I guess some take offense to that entire premise. As a pagan mom, that moral interweaved with the tale is what makes it so valuable.It is an empowering story of a girl who, by paying attention to and loving the natural world around her, has the power to help sav...

I only made it a chapter into this so maybe I shouldn't even give it any stars but I'll at least explain why I stopped reading so quickly. It's preachy and insulting to the intelligence of all 9 and up years olds out there. The dialogue and thought processes of the main character seem to scream " I'm what adults want to think 9 years are thinking!" -- I should have known, though, the synopsis on the back uses the phrase "factory farming." Gah.

This series is written by a local author, which was enough of a stimulus for me to give it a try. It's basically an earth-friendly girl-power story, and while it gets a little preach at times (even on subjects outside of the environment, like advertising), it was good enough to make me get book 2 out of the library.

I wish this book would have been written 15 years ago! Even though it is aimed towards a young audience, it was highly entertaining and such a positive message! A message that is highly needed now more then ever... I cant wait for the rest of the series to be written! I will pass this book on to everyone I know!

This is the next book my Mighty Girls book club is going to read. I really enjoyed it. A compelling story, well written with the mystical elements interwoven expertly. I typically do not enjoy fantasy, etcetera but this author does it very well and the story remains grounded in 'reality'. Can't wait hear what the mighty girls think!

Wow, this book was terrible! moralizing, judgemental, unreadable. We all know that girls who read teen magazines could never truly care for the environment. There are so many other books that accomplish teaching respect for the enviroment without resorting to didactism. Don't bother!