Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Here lies another children's picture book mangled by Amazon! I cannot understand at all why any publisher would want to release this in a Kindle version, not even just for review. If there's one thing that Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process does with utter reliability, it's that it totally mangles anything that's not plain vanilla text. This is one of many reasons reason I refuse to do business with Amazon. The Kindle version of this was chopped, shredded, julienned, and sliced and diced until the story was out of order and made no sense. Even on a iPad, the images were reliably out of order and sliced in half, and not vertical so they would have at least followed the pages, but horizontally, so it was impossible to read. Some of the text was so small that it was blurred out of legibility.
Fortunately, in both Bluefire Reader and Adobe Digital Editions it looked perfectly fine. Originally published as "Mauro de Ruimtereiziger" by Belgian artist and writer An Leysen, this is now available in English. It's beautifully illustrated (in the non-Kindle versions) and tells the thought adventure of Mara, who travels in a helicopter-like spaceship to a distant planet inhabited by little reptilian creatures of the forest. Their habitat is being threatened by the thoughtless and selfish sun-king who is drying up everything and turning it into desert under the guise of providing sunlight to everyone. Mara manages to defeat him by engaging with the water dwellers, and then she's off to another adventure!
This story was short and gorgeously illustrated, and very charming. I commend it as a worthy read.
