I would rate this book at around a 3 out of 5. The characters all seemed very stereotypical to me, and the plot was a little too predictable. I enjoyed the illustrations and the climax of the story, but the rest of the story wasn’t incredibly captivating to me.
The main theme of this story seemed to be the frequent name dropping of various famous books that characters had read, and talking about them in glossed over ways. The books in question were primarily ones that I would not expect the target audience (8-12) of this book to have actually read, so it seemed questionable to me whether or not the target audience would understand these references or even be interested by them (for example, Beowulf and Shakespeare). This just seemed like a miss by the author.
Another thing that I disliked was the pacing of the story. There were strings of paragraphs about various topics here and there which didn’t really seem fleshed out or tied together well. As a result, I wondered why things had been mentioned at all, or wondered about events which were skipped over.
In general, it was an enjoyable story and a quick read. But, on the other hand, it was just not a spectacular story that I would want to keep on my bookshelf.
星女 