I had higher hopes for this book. As it is geared towards children, I hoped for an error free book. Instead, there were spelling and grammar errors that I had to explain to my son. A good opportunity for learning, yes, but then he wondered how old the author was. Perhaps a quick revision with an editor would be helpful?
______________________________
**** 5/21/12 ****
I noticed that this review was downvoted and that another, positive review was posted about 6 hours after this one went live. I see that the other reviewer seems to have all of the author's books. I'm so glad that she has enjoyed them so much and was able to leave so many 5 star reviews for her books. I see that she is also the author of children's books, which is a neat coincidence. That's the thing about books - some people like them and some people don't. For me, I buy hundreds of books for my kindle and ipad, so when I pay a few bucks for them, I don't expect greatness, but I do expect professional editing.
I feel like perhaps I should elaborate as the previous review was deemed "unhelpful." Comma use throughout the book has no consistency. For example, "I did Mom." "Well do something about it." versus using commas heavily in "I would have been upset, but I was too tired, and besides, he didn't destroy anything."
There are typos throughout, such as "soemthing" "riped" (rather than ripped) and occasionally an extra space like "I 'm".
The storyline is as follows. A child has a dinosaur follow him home. He asks mom if he can keep it and mom reluctantly agrees provided there is some responsibility. Chaos ensues, including a dish breaking session, a traumatized cat, a ripped to pieces backpack, middle of the night gargling and pantry destruction...
At the end, our protagonist admits his mistake and mom (who has the patience of a saint while waiting for her child to realize this) finds a local dinosaur breeder (one of many) to take his pet.
Now, of course it is fiction - however, in our family, we talk a lot about pets being for a lifetime and not supporting breeders. Not a huge deal, but if you are an animal adoption activist, I think this storyline will be off-putting.
So this is why my review was not glowing. I tried my best to be positive though, as any book takes an incredible amount of effort. I also hoped that my review of the typos might prompt the author to do a re-read on her next book or speak with her editor. I hope my further explanation serves to make this review more helpful.
