Tuesday 28 April 2020

Book Review: Beau Bear: The Tale of the Hidden Blue Treasure by M.R. Everette

⭐⭐ out of 5

First off, this book is aimed at 4-6 year olds but they have very different reading abilities... 4 year olds don't know how to read the alphabet, but 6 year olds are just starting to read books themselves with adult help, so who is it more suitable for?

Also, the title alone would put children off because they wouldn't know what "beau" was, let alone how to pronounce it!

Oh dear.  If a child looked at the first page of text, they would put the book back on the shelf 'cos in only one page there are more words than a 6 year old could read... way too daunting!

In the first paragraph alone, there are words waaaay too advanced for such young children... I'm thinking this is more for 8-10+ rather than 4-6 and even they would struggle already!

Another page full of text!  This is definitely more for older children than the small ones it's aimed at and we haven't even got onto the boat yet!

And a third page full of text... the author has lost even the most dedicated reader by now and has used up an entire book's industry-length word count on each page and there's still 9 pages to go!

There's no way any child would know how tall "forty-foot high waves" were either... it's been metric for well over 30 years so far!

Just finished reading the book and it's waaaay to advanced for the audience it's aimed at... it's more like a very short early chapter book without the chapters judging by the vocabulary and length the author has used.

Judging by the graphics, this is a self-published book too and I'm guessing the author had got so frustrated by the rejections from publishers with it not meeting industry standards that they gave up and self-published it rather than seriously editing it to meet requirements of the industry.

I don't like giving negative reviews, but there is very little I can find to be positive about with this book, unfortunately.  Sorry.

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