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.

Nick and Tesla's Special Effects Spectacular by Steve Hockensmith

Title: Nick and Tesla's Special Effects Spectacular
Author: Steve Hockensmith
Publisher: Quirk Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Science advisor: Bob Pflugfelder.

This story wasn't for me, but I'm rating it positively for several reasons, not least of which is that it definitely was for the age group (middle grade) at which it's aimed. In addition to that, it has a strong female character who isn't sidelined or dependent upon a male figure (and from a male writer! Why can't female writers do a better job at this? YA authors, I'm looking at you!). In addition to that it has gadgets you can make (and relatively inexpensively), some of which are not really practical to use (such as the grappling hook), others of which are eminently practical, even ingenious, such as the steadicam device.

If there's one thing we need to encourage in our kids academically, it's math and science, and I am on-board with pretty much every book out there which nudges kids in that direction. Science isn't for nerds, it's for everyone, and it plays an important part in everyday life. It can help you to understand the world around you and live a better life in it, with greater understanding of how everything works.

This is one of a series (the first I've read). You do not have to have read the others to enjoy this one. Fraternal (or sororal, why not?!) twins Nick and Tesla Holt are, to be frank, rather neglected in the regard that their parents are evidently always away on projects across the globe, leaving the kids in the care of their "mad scientist" uncle. I had two problems with this: first that this neglect is effectively presented as a good thing, and second that their uncle Newt is presented as your stereotypical mad scientist, always blowing things up. I think that was a bad choice, and a better choice would have been to have kept the kids at home with their parents, and had mom be the engineer/inventor instead of having a clichéd male scientist character.

However, if you're willing to overlook that, then there is a cool adventure to be had here. There's something afoot in the movie industry, and Nick and Tesla have an 'in' to the studio back-lot through a relative of a friend of theirs. Together, Demarco, Nick, Silas, and Tesla solve the crime, and learn a huge amount about movie-making and special effects. I would have loved a story like this when I was that age. Who is leaking embarrassing paparazzi-style footage onto the Internet? Who is sabotaging filming on the set - and why?

I would have preferred a stronger word or two of caution with regard to having kids running around the studio lot (or any place of work, especially where there's a potential for serious injury) unescorted, but that aside, the kids show smarts and responsibility, and they show inventiveness - two of them are making their own movie: "Bald Eagle: The Legend Takes Flight" featuring their own special effects, with which Tesla and Nick are helping. Thus they have the grappling tool, the robo-arm, a stunt dummy and the steadicam rig.

The only big problem I had with this is one which I've had with several other books. The translation of the book into Kindle format sucks! I mean it seriously sucks. Take a look at the sample screen-shot on my blog. This was one of very many such screens which are screwed-up for several reasons: because the text is ragged - failing to run to the full width of the screen, or it's randomly displayed as gray instead of black, or the text randomly changes size for a few words before reverting to its original size, or page numbers appear in the text. All f those issues can be seen in the image here.

There's absolutely no excuse for this shoddy presentation whatsoever, not even in an advance review copy. The novel isn't due out until May - there was plenty of time to finish up the illustrations and get the presentation right! Hopefully the commercial version of the Kindle version will be error-free! However I am not rating this in the presentation of the ARC, but on the writing and the story, which I rate as a worthy story.