This felt like it was written a bit young for middle grade readers, but it's been a long time since I was twelve or thirteen (the age of the protagonist), so who knows! It's a short novel about a girl named Samantha Taylor who is shy and timid and who slowly learns to take her place in the world. It has been expanded into an ongoing series, so I understand, and if you or your middle-grader likes it, there's more to read after this volume. For me, though it began well, it felt a bit plodding and the characters didn't seem too smart, so although I began by liking it, the more I read, the more problems I had with it and I DNF'd it about a third the way through.
The tale was interesting enough and moved at a decent pace to start with, but once the treasure hunt began, it slowed painfully and the characters seemed utterly unable to grasp the simplest of clues, or to resolve the easiest of problems. The book description has it that there's a "forbidden forest, an injured wolf, and a forgotten tale of lost gold" so that sounded pretty intriguing, but the forest wasn't really forbidden, the wolf behaved far too much like a pet dog rather than a wild animal and never at any point was any concern raised that it might be rabid, and the lost treasure wasn't actually forgotten!
Neither was its location: the treasure never was actually discovered. Fortunately the wolf wasn't rabid, and though it was quite young it was hardly a puppy. It was injured and I think that the author thought the kids taking care of it would somehow magically domesticate it, but it doenslt work like that. Given that wolves usually hang out in a pack, where were all the others? There was no mention of any other wolves, nor any concern over them showing up - not in the portion I read.
Samantha's bravery starts in that forest when she decides to walk the two miles home form school along a hiking trail in the forest rather than take the school bus after a particularly trying day. She'd rather be alone, but you're never alone in nature, and things start happening right then and there. Fortunately she has my namesake to help her out in a pinch, and the strange friendship begins. I found her growth from her initial nervous state to be a bit pedantic, but otherwise not too bad, if belabored somewhat.
I had a few issues with the story though, such as when I read, "They started showing up to school in skirts and fitted tops that showed off their legs and sometimes their midriffs." I was amusedly thinking, "how does a fitted top show off their legs? But it's just the poorly-considered juxtaposition of words that's confusing. Another instance was where I read, "up ahead a black crow cawed" but all crows are black in the USA (unless you happen upon an albino). There's a gray crow, but that's out in Indonesia, so describing it as a black crow seemed redundant. The author didn't seem to know much about the natural world she was trying to represent, and this cropped-up several times.
There were a couple of other issues, like where I read, "Her whole body was shivering and shaking as she tread water." The past tense of 'to tread' is 'trod', not 'tread' and certainly not 'treaded' which the author uses later.
At about that same point in the text the two children, and a man who was helping them, were looking to cross a ravine. It was only 40 feet deep and fifteen feet wide and it would not have been hard to find a way to descend one side and climb the other. The children proved this by finding just such a place quite quickly. The problem was that the outdoorsman's first 'solution' to this problem was to fell a tree and let it drop across the gap. I felt that this was setting a bad example, and not just because a twenty foot tree is heavy as hell, and the guy would need some serious help to manipulate it into a stable position, even if he succeeded in felling it perfectly across the gap at first try (he didn't).
It sets a bad example because we desperately need all the trees we can get, since they're the only entity which is serious about combatting climate change. Trees alone cannot do it, admittedly; we need to get the CO2 out of the air to fix it, but cutting down trees never helps. If it had been done for something critical, then I could have let that slide, but it sure wasn't, and to have this go right ahead without a word about what killing this tree meant, was not excusable for me.
Even if we set all of that aside though, there remains still the fact is that this tree was in a forest that was on land none of these people owned. They had no permission to take an axe to anything, yet they assumed they could do whatever they wanted. This and the climate change angle are very bad precedents to set for children, especially in an era of selfishness and 'me first' self-entitlement that's been coagulating around us over the last four years. Some of these issues are minor quibbles that don't make or break a novel. Others are much more serious and writers need to be aware, especially in a children's novel, of what kind of an impression they're putting into young people's minds.
At one point, due to the stupidity of one of the characters, the main characters are attacked by wasps and have to run and jump into a small lake, like this is a cartoon. The whole thing was unrealistic. This boy was spying on the others and when he thought he'd been seen, he ran off. He had no idea the others would track his footprints, so there was no reason why he would climb a tree. It seems more likely that he'd keep running, or he'd double back to spy on them some more, from a different location.
This was written like he knew he was being followed, even though he couldn't have. Even if he did, it's more likely he'd try to hide in undergrowth than climb a tree where he'd be pretty obvious - and especially not climb a tree by a wasp nest unless he's painfully stupid. It felt like this little part was lifted directly from The Hunger Games!
That wasn't the real problem though. It was the wasps! After the attack, I read, "He started picking the stingers out of his skin." The author doesn't seem to get that it's not wasps that leave their stingers. It's bees. A wasp stinger can occasionally break off or get left, but it's rare. The author should have learned this if she wants to write about it.
Also wasps do not have a deadly vendetta against people who disturb the nest. They will fly around randomly, and home in on perceived offenders, but usually they won't stray more than fifty or a hundred feet from the nest in doing this. Young children, dogs, and even an older man would not have a problem running away, and certainly wouldn't need to jump into a lake or pond to escape them. This whole section was misleading when it could have been educational.
Another problem is that these kids knew this other boy, Billy, was lurking around in the woods. They also knew he was trouble, but it was like they had this constant blind spot where he was concerned, so they never took precautions thinking he might be around or spying on them, and whenever they felt someone was watching them, or they saw this kid spying on them in the distance, they never immediately thought it was Billy, despite wracking their brains about who it could be.
For that matter, nor did the author account for him being in the woods in the first place to even start following them. The woods didn't seem like the kind of place a kid like Billy would hang out. He was more likely to be at the mall shoplifting, or playing videogames at home. This lent a certain degree of implausibility to the story in and of itself where he was concerned.
There was also a mistake in the book description where the section addressed to teachers says, "This realistic fiction book is chalk full of subtle lessons about bravery." I think the author meant 'chock full' but maybe it was a play on words: you know - teachers and chalk? LOL! Again, a minor thing. Often authors don't get to write their own book descriptions, but I think that wasn't the case here since this author publishes through Smashwords, which is a self-publishing platform that I abandoned several years ago because I experienced far too many issues with them. Life has been a lot easier for me since I started dealing directly with the platforms I publish on, although there are always issues of one kind or another!
On a slightly different topic, but also tied to Smashwords supposedly being picky about formatting, there was an inexplicable and problematic formatting issue in my ebook. It resulted in the lines of text breaking oddly. The new line would start indented right below the roevious one, even though it wasn't a new paragraph. The impression I got was that the break represented an actual hard break in the line as it would appear on a full sized-page, but because I was reading this on my phone's narrower screen, these hard 'carriage returns' resulted in the odd formatting. I tested this on my iPad and sure enough, it appeared to be the case that it's hard-formatted for a specific text size, and using hanging paragraphs with a ragged right edge, so it doesn't flow properly when you change typeface or typeface size.
Any one, or maybe even two or three of these issues wouldn't be an insurmountable problem, but to have so many of them in a book with largely uninspiring characters and a rather limp story was a bit too much for me to declare this book a worthy read. There may well be middle-graders who will like this. I can't really speak for them. All I can do is to judge this based on its entertainment and educational value and I personally found it lacking in both. It came off poorly in a comparison with some other middle-grade novels I've read and enjoyed. I found this particular book, on balance, to be disappointingly less than a worthy read, and for the reasons given, I cannot commend it.
