Showing posts with label Bob Pflugfelder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bob Pflugfelder. Show all posts

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Nick and Tesla's Solar-Powered Showdown by Bob Pflugfelder, Steve Hockensmith


Rating: WARTY!

I enjoyed the first volume that I read in this series which I reviewed back in March 2015, but this one fell flat for me. there were multiple problems with it. One which I am not counting against it is the poor presentation in Kindle's app for Android phones. Kindle has the suckiest app imaginable. Not every novel suffers from its depredations, but disturbingly many do, and this was one of them. The formatting was horrible, with text randomly exhibiting large font in the middle of nowhere, or small font likewise, or random caps in titles, and oddball numbers appearing in the middle of the text, which seemed to be page numbers. The fact that there was an annoying number of frivolous footnotes didn't help, either. Please note that this was an advance review copy, so perhaps the formatting problems will be resolved before the final version emerges. Here's an example of how it appeared:

Uncle Newt’s hairless cat Eureka jumped onto75

76

the dining room table,
Here's an example of the page numbers being mixed up with the footnotes, making a complete mess:
“In the past month, we’ve rescued77 a little girl from kidnappers, 5 defeated an army of robot robbers, 6 captured a ring of spies, 7 and thwarted the sabotage of both a major museum 8 and a big Hollywood movie. 9
The Kindle app on the iPad was just as bad. The Bluefire reader version on the iPad was fine.

That stuff was annoying, but the real problem here was not the formatting; it was the content. The story really wasn't very good, and it had a depressing amount of dumb to it. Parts of it were quite amusing, I grant, but nowhere near enough to carry this. Perhaps children with low expectations might find this entertaining, but I know that my kids would not find it appealing and they are only just outside of the middle grade age-range at which this is evidently aimed. To me it felt far too simplistic for modern sophisticated audiences, even young audiences, and there's not enough going on to keep them occupied. The gadgets the kids can build, which I felt was one of the strong points of this series in the other volume I read, were rather limp here. Two of them for example, consisted of a solar hot dog cooker which to me seemed a bit dubious (it's not wise to risk eating under-cooked meat, for example), and a balloon-powered ping-pong ball "cannon" which might be fun to play with, but which has nothing to do with solar power.

Some of the writing was not very smart, either. For example, consider this exchange:

It was bought for her by someone named Louis Quatorze.”
“Louis Squatorzi? What the heck kind of name is that?” Silas said.
Now we can see how Silas would have possibly mispronounced the name like he did if he had read it, as we are doing, but he didn't, he heard it. It would not have sounded like 'Louis Squatorzi' unless their uncle, who spoke those words, was a complete moron. Perhaps he was; he certinily behaved like it at times, but this felt far more like a case of a writer reading what they wrote instead of imagining it being spoken.

One thing which really bothered me was the lifestyle these children were leading, which seemed completely at odds with the environmental message which was supposedly being sent. The message was be kind to the environment, yet they were still tooling around in gas-guzzling and fume-emitting vehicles. There was no mention of electric or hybrid vehicles here, but the worst thing was these children's diet - they consumed a non-stop conveyor belt of junk food, which was frankly disgusting, and not the kind of thing I want my kids to be reading. If there had been some 'valid' reason for this - like they were captive and starving, and had no access to anything else, then I can see that sliding by, but this seemed to be their routine daily diet and it was highly inappropriate. It also detracted from the environmental message in that these kids evidently didn't know how to take care of themselves and eat healthily, so how on Earth could they take care of the planet? What kind of message does it send that this is supposedly a science-based story, and yet the sciences of biology, biochemistry, and health care are so abysmally neglected?

But based on the overall quality of the story, I honestly can't recommend this novel.