Written by Swan, and illustrated by Wills, this picture book aimed at young children was a serious disappointment. I got the impression that it had been designed as a print book and then tossed into the ebook world as an afterthought, and it didn't work. I had thought it might be amusing, being already familiar with what wellybobs are (for the uninitiated, it's a cute Brit name for wellington boots, aka galoshes).
I looked at this using Net Galley's PDF, and that was messed up. It looked like picture ebooks usually look like when viewed in a Kindle. The Amazon process is renowned in my experience for shredding, spindling, and julienning picture books - or anything that isn't plain vanilla text for that matter - and sure enough it turned this book into kindling as expected. How this became so bad, and yet no one seems to have noticed, is a mystery to me, but based on the two examples I saw, in two different formats, this book is a disaster. Maybe the print version looks sweet, but I don't get to see that.
The story is supposed to be about elves having an adventure helping a squirrel find a nut, but in the PDF version, I had to page through several blank pages to find any with an illustration, and when I got there, there was no text. None at all. Not anywhere after the introductory page. The images were also split between screens, and viewing them in landscape mode did nothing to improve upon this.
The Kindle version did have text, but the pictures were split between screens and the text did not match the picture it appeared next to. I paged through to about half-way and seeing no sign of improvement, I gave up on it. Yes, the text rhymes, but that's not all it takes to make an engaging story. The illustrations were okay, but nothing spectacular enough to make up for the poor presentation, so overall I was not at all impressed, and I cannot commend this as a worthy read.
