Tuesday 7 September 2021

Book Review: "The Extraordinary Pause" by Sara Sadik


⭐⭐ out of 5

Every book I read and review starts off with the full five stars and I'm always hopeful that it'll end with them all too.

The first thing I notice is that the author has said the reading age is "Baby - 11 years" and it's got 38 pages, so I'm thinking it's a picture book, in which case a child over 5-6 years old just wouldn't be interested and such young children wouldn't know what "pause" meant, let alone "extraordinary" I get that the author wanted to incorporate the "pause" symbol but such a young audience wouldn't appreciate it, so the first star is already coming off and I haven't even opened the cover yet!

Judging by the vocabulary choices, I'm guessing that the author is aiming it at the top end of the reading age group, but didn't have enough inspiration/motivation to make it into a longer book.  I realise that it's a non-fiction book, but surely that should have even more words and a better, more carefully chosen language in it?  I personally feel, at the moment, that the author has had the idea to write this book, but didn't have enough words to say what she wanted to say, so said it was suitable for younger children so that she felt able to get away with a smaller word count and number of pages?  That's the second star gone already unfortunately.

The author is definitely confused about her audience because she's using less than a sentence on every page, which is suitable for younger children, but she's also using words that are more suitable for the older age group.  Younger children would be restless in frustration and older children would have stopped reading by the second page.  The third star is coming off already unfortunately and I'm only half way through the book!

Thankfully I've just finished the book and it was hugely disappointing but many of the graphics were good, so that stopped me from knocking off the fourth star.  Unfortunately the only recommendation I can make about this book is to avoid it unless you want to be as hugely disappointed as I am.

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