Rating: WARTY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Subtitled "The Wild Place Adventure Series" this is evidently the first of a wildlife series for middle-grade readers. I'm not a big fan of series, and while there are some exceptions, this did not make the list. I started out liking this one, but ended up feeling like it did not achieve its goal. That said, I'm not the audience for this, but I have two kids who are just out of that age range and I can't see either of them wanting to read this, although they are far from a scientific sample!
There were several issues which led me to my conclusion which I shall get to. To begin with, overall it offered a decent start to the plot, and the writing isn't bad at all, except for the section where I read, "...the smell of wet, moist things coming back to life." Things are not usually wet and moist! But any writer can say odd things, which is why proof-reading is such a tedious but necessary chore. And what we wrote sounded so goodwhen we first wrote it, didn't it?!
The book is very animal-centric (which I personally enjoy), but sometimes that was overdone, as I shall mention shortly. Despite this, it seemed to 'fall off the wagon' after a while and become much more about the main female character than ever it was about leatherback turtles, which seemed to defeat the purpose. The thing I liked at first was that it avoided giving the animals magical powers or human qualities, or having them talk (which I personally detest unless it's in an out-and-out fantasy story), but it even jumped those rails before long, and this is what ultimately turned me off it.
Young Robin Green works with her father (when not in school!) in a wildlife rescue center. Her father is a vet. Her mother died a while back and Robin is still understandably feeling it, but she's trying to cope, despite having self-doubts and confidence crises from time to time, unlike her sister Zo-Zo, who is super self-possessed much to Robin's chagrin. Robin also has a younger brother nicknamed Squirm, who loves bugs of all kinds, of course.
I didn't get the young boys name at all (or Zo-Zo's for that matter), but I let that go. What I found really lacking credibility was that so many things happened in so short a time, including the bear with its head in a bucket which they encountered on their way to the airport, and which took things too far for me, especially when Robin flew off after it without a thought for safety. This is not a good thing to teach young kids.
Any animal can be dangerous, especially if it's sick or frightened, and wild animals definitely are dangerous, especially a bear. Fortunately her father had a convenient tranquilizer gun and even more conveniently, a shot prepared beforehand for the exact size and weight of the bear in question; frankly it was a bit too fortuitous for credibility, and hoping kids in the intended age grange for reading this won't notice is not only risky, it's a bit insulting to the kids.
It was like the author wanted to include everything she possibly could in the story, but adding so much stuff robbed each individual event of any chance it had of being a special moment. It became instead mundane, and the animal encounter suffered from this conveyor-belt approach in my opinion. One example of this kind of thing was in how the baby turtles were described, There was nothing about their outsize flippers (comparative to their baby body size) which s what I find one of the most hilarious and completely adorable things about them.
Worse, there was nothing about the many predators which seek out these 'turtle runs' and which eat their fill of the largely helpless hatchlings as they scatter across the sand in a desperate rush for the comparative safety of the ocean. That was a bad mistake. It's not only humans which imperil turtles and it never helps to sugar-coat a story like this.
Robin finds herself with an unlikely opportunity to visit Costa Rica and help save these leatherbacks which are under threat from egg-poachers. Again I found this a little bit too fortuitous, and I could not let it go because it suggested that the Costa Ricans had no interest in helping leatherbacks, and/or there are no adults or kids there who could or would help, or who were able to design websites or contribute in some way. It felt too much like the insulting trope of the 'white man coming to the rescue of the native'.
Leatherbacks are the fourth largest reptile currently extant on our little planet, after the crocodilians. They're not considered endangered, but they're rated vulnerable, which is a threatened status only one stop down from endangered. To me, it's tragic to see how the little turtles, in their mad rush to reach the ocean and safety, are preyed-upon mercilessly by seagulls and other such predatory birds, as well as by crabs, and then other competing life in the ocean. Sometimes nature sucks even while it's being perfectly natural, doesn’t it?
The problem is that Robin is a bit of a wuss and even while she's excited by the trip, she isn't looking forward to the humidity and heat in Costa Rica. She's also unaccountably perturbed by the presence of scorpions, which is peculiar since there are scorpions in Canada believe it or not.
It’s only one species, the boreal scorpion, and as a threat, it’s more like a spider - small and not commonly known to sting humans. Neither Canadian nor Costa Rican scorpions are deadly. But the fact that Robin was supposedly a bit of a wildlife expert yet had this huge fear of scorpions like they were rare and exotic made no sense. The fact that Squirm, supposedly an expert on insects and arachnids, didn't remind Robin of the native scorpion undermined his credibility too.
At one point the book refers to people who are "Chinese or Asian" seemingly forgetting that Chinese are Asians, as are Indians. I mention this because it struck me as odd that the two should be separated, like there's no connection between them, but it’s important in one respect because the Asian predation of turtle eggs has pretty much driven nesting populations there to extinction. Good luck with keeping your jellyfish populations in check you guys now you've killed-off a major predator of them! They will pay the price for their stupidity, selfishness and short-sightedness in Southeast Asia.
Another minor quibble was a discussion of "poisonous insects." Some insects may well be poisonous if eaten, but I think what was intended here was to discuss if they were venomous. There is a difference! There's also a difference between kids talking of snakes and insects being "poisonous," which many people habitually do, and the narrator of the story using the wrong terminology! The one is likely, the other is not a good idea.
The point where Robin's dead mother magically started appearing to her turned me off this story completely, and I think it was a mistake to take this route. It ran the story into fantasy land, thereby undermining all the factual and 'hard science' material which had gone before. Dead moms do not reappear, and I think it sets a bad, and even scary precedent to make kids think that a parent who died would come back to help them, and an especially bad one to suggest she will rescue them by making an animal, in this case a snake, act out of character by biting a kidnapper for no good reason. The kidnapping itself lacked credibility or that matter.
On a final note, and this goes to the story drifting into fantasy land: animals - reptiles included - cannot smell fear. The author avoided that pitfall by saying they can "sense fear. They knew fear made things weak." That first part is correct to an extent; the second part is the fantasy. Even telling kids that animals can smell/sense fear is a bad step to take because it makes the child fearful, and therefore much less likely to have a good interaction with the animal. Telling them instead that animals are very sensitive and kids need to be gentle and careful with how they approach them is much wiser.
Just to put the idea out there, like it's a 'smell fear' kind of magical thing is insulting to the animal and misses the much more important and interesting reality of how sensitive some animals truly are, and how entrallingly perceptive they can be. While I would add birds to this skill level, I would not include reptiles, amphibians, and fish in the mix because they do not have the kind of brain which mammals and birds do. Snakes are essentially rodent killing machines (amongst other prey); they have no mammalian traits and to lump all animals together is to mislead children and do an injustice to the animals for the fascinating skill sets that they do have.
One final issue has to do not with the plot or writing, but with the overall formatting of the book. To talk about rescuing animals and not include plants in the picture is a short-sighted approach since one depends so much on the other. It seemed hypocritical therefore to put out a wildlife book which makes such tree-abusing use of the printed page. In an ebook this doesn't matter since it's all lumped together (especially if you read it in Amazon's crappy Kindle app which seems to think formatting is a joke), but when I read this in Bluefire Reader, which gives a much better impression of how the printed page will look, you see that there are problems.
This book locked-up Bluefire Reader (BR), which reads PDFs! It completely disabled the app so you could not tap on anything and have it respond. The first time it did this was on page 100, so thinking I had a bad copy, I downloaded it again, and the second copy would not let me get past page 14! I downloaded it to my desktop on which is installed Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), and I found in this, I could type in some page numbers, and it would go there, but for others, such as pages around page 14, it would simply spin its wheels and not go anywhere for some time.
Eventually it settled on page 15 which is a prologue, which I routinely do not read anyway, but it took an inordinate amount of time to alight there, and to try and click the bar to go to the next page didn't work any better. Once I'd got past about page 17, then things seemed to work again until I got to page 94, when it locked up again. At this point I gave up experimenting, but something is definitely wrong with the PDF of this book! I've never had these problems with other books in ADE or BR that I can recall.
Another issue was the overall look of the page. On my desktop computer in ADE, the book measured 10 inches tall by 6.5 inches wide. The print area covered four inches by eight It doesn't matter what the exact measurements are in the printed book because I'm talking relative percentages here. These huge margins meant that the actual printed area was roughly fifty percent of the page and the rest was blank. That's an appalling waste of trees.
No one wants a book which is printed gutter to edge and top to bottom, with the printed lines all crowded together by any means! It has to be readable and catered to the age of the reading audience, but to waste around fifty percent of a page and thereby slaughter far more trees for a large print run than is 'necessary' is an appalling abuse, especially in a book which claims such an affinity for the natural world. Maybe other people do not care or even think about this, but I do, and it's become for me a criterion when it comes to rating books.
As I said, this is an advance review copy so hopefully the final edition will not have the issues I discussed above. In Kindle it worked fine, but the formatting, as usual with Kindle, sucked. The turtle logo at the start of each chapter occupied a full screen and it did not work as intended because it was just one more screen to swipe by before I could start reading the chapter.
I keep my Kindle app set with a black background and white text to save power, so the turtle logo, black on white really stood out, which made it more annoying! These are formatting issues and have nothing to do with the story itself except in the practical experience of reading it. I just wish that publishers would pay more attention to the overall reading experience in different media than they do.
So talking of overall, this was not a great reading experience either in the book itself or because of technical issues. Hopefully these will be resolved in the final edition, but based on the book content alone, I cannot rate this as a worthy read, although I wish the author all the best in her series. It has some very promising potential.
