One Summer Up North by John Owens

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a short and text-free story of the author's trip into the wilderness of the Boundary Waters area on the US-Canada border in Minnesota on the US side. Maybe now isn't the best time to release this given the Coronavirus lockdowns, but better early than never, right?

This review was embargoed until August 15th, and this is a day early, but since there have been reviews published on that execrable Goodreads indie-killer review aggregating site - the one owned by Amazon - since May this year I don't feel guilty cheating by 24 hours, especially since I'm going to be busy tomorrow. The story is very simple and tells in pure pictures about the arrival, the canoeing, the camping, and so on.

I have to say up front that this kind of thing isn't my cup of tea, so while I thought it might be interesting, what I was really looking for here was the artwork and how appealing the story made this trip appear. I know that for the author, it had to have been special, and wonderful and entrancing, otherwise why write a book about it? The problem is that for me, it never came across as that. I never felt any desire to go there, not during reading, nor after I'd read this.

When I sat and thought about it afterwards, it occurred to me that there were two reasons for that. The first was that nature was missing! I mean, yeah, it was there, but only in part. It seemed like a painted backdrop to the author's story rather than the author's story, and there were undoubtedly things that were missing, such black flies, mosquitos, ticks, horseflies, deer flies...and bears. Oh my! The wildlife shown was the cute and cuddly kind, nothing else. You know full-well there are biting flies up there unless you go very early (before May, when the weather might be the problem) or late in the season (again, weather!), but according to this telling, there were none. I don't buy it!

Obviously there's more to a vacation than the problems - there are also the joys, but this seemed dishonestly all joy and no penalty. That would be nice - thinking you could lie there and contemplate your navel, or the sky, or the babbling brook or rustling trees, or whatever, without any irritations - meditating pleasantly on the natural world, but it's not really like that, especially not if you have to keep packing up your camp site to move to the next one, and setting up and starting fires and maintaining fires and putting out fires and on and on. I guess it depends upon what trips your trigger - or in this case triggers your trips, but for me the appeal was missing.

The second problem I had was the artwork itself. It really didn't do anything for the location. It was flat and bland and for the longest time I could not figure out what the water lilies were. At first I thought they were maybe logs - that some logging was going on and these were the logs floating down the river, but that seemed a bit off. It took me a couple of pages and then a backtrack to realize they were water lilies! The perspective seemed all wrong in that first picture. The rest of the art was equally uninspiring.

I wish the author all the best in his career, but based on my reaction to this as it stands, I can't commend it as a worthy read.

Goodnight Campsite by Loretta Sponsler, Olga Shevchenko

Rating: WARTY!

This little book crashed my Kindle app on my smartphone - twice! The Kindle app always was crappy, but this is a precedent. I don't know what happened. When I first read it, it was fine. It was when I was trying to leaf through it for this review that I ran into trouble. The book opened at the end, which was where I'd left it, but I couldn't summon the slide bar at the bottom of the screen to go back to the start, nor would the pages swipe. The Kindle eventually popped up a message saying the app had crashed (but not in those words! LOL!).

I removed it from the device and re-downloaded it, and instead of tapping the screen to get the slide bar, I swiped back through the pages, and it worked fine the third time. Just FYI. I know it's unlikely your kid is going to be reading from the phone, but it could happen! It seems to be connected with the slide bar. If you don't use that for navigation, you should be fine.

I also tested it on an iPad and it seemed fine there, even though I was using the same Kindle app. The book looked very different on the tablet though. How Amazon explains that, other than they they have a shoddy and inconsistent app, I don't know, but based on this experience I'm not rating this as a worthy read, because it took several attempts and forever to get it to download to the pad in the first place! I recommend assuming you insist upon reading this, the print version even though it means killing a tree or two.

The title is slightly misleading - it's not one of your usual "Goodnight..." books, and I was glad of this. Instead it begins with a map of the campsite, and then lets you follow various campers, with poetic descriptions of their activities from Loretta Sponsler, - from biking to hiking, from picnics to quick dips, from fishing to swishing golf clubs, and so on. It's very colorful and nicely drawn by Olga Shevchenko (what a pair of delicious names to pay with there, huh?).

There are "bingo" sheets at the end which you can print out and have your kids check-off items as they encounter various things reading through the book. There's also a very nosy squirrel to see if you can find in each picture. So while I thought the book was ok, the poor experience I had with the e-version makes me dis-recommend it.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

Title: My Side of the Mountain
Author: Jean Craighead George
Pages: 177

Publisher: Puffin Modern Classics
Rating: Worthy!
Perspective: first person past

Review of My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
by Mac Wood

This is a unique book. It shows in a fictional way what a teenage kid can do in the wild. Bringing only a few items, Sam Gribley lives off the land in the Catskill Mountains. Sam decides to leave his boring life in New York City and experience the mountains first-hand. He soon finds a nice tree to live in, and a peregrine falcon as his BFF. He learns how to fish, to make a door for his tree house from an animal skin, to use a fireplace, and much more.

I got interested in this book because my art teacher read it to my class once. I found it on a bookshelf and decided to read it. I think I learned a lot about survival from this book, too. Even though it's only fiction, it still has some truth in it. My favorite part was when Sam caught his falcon, named Frightful. I recommend this book to young adults who plan on camping out for a week or two. Adventure lovers should read this novel, too!