Thursday 12 November 2009

The Bouncing Boy, by Ilia

The bouncing boy lives a life of ridicule and misfortune until one day his help was needed to save his village from a stinking problem. An exciting adventure ensues with the bouncing boy and an unlikely comrade, an elder from the village. Will this duo survive the trip to find the solution to save the village?

The Bouncing Boy is an entertaining modern day fairy tale enjoyed by kids 1-100 years old.



This is a singularly unattractive book. The illustrations are off-putting, and very uneven: that awful cover illustration is repeated inside, not once but twice, and after that, the illustrations change entirely in both style and sophistication (I suspect that they are produced by photoshopping photographs, but can't be sure). The text clearly comes from a novice writer, and shows the usual mistakes: hyphens used instead of dashes, misplaced punctuation, odd capitalisations, occasional contradictions, errors in grammar, and a few sentences which made no sense at all. A lot of these problems could have been resolved by careful edit: but this writer would do better to work on becoming a better writer, and then write a better book. I read just three of its 54 pages.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Decades ago (late 70s, early 80s?) The Writer's Market used to carry a listing from some major publisher stating that they did not want "Ignatz the Egg" stories. Wish I could remember their exact wording, it was quite humorous, but the gist was that they received way too many stories in which the main character, whom they called Ignatz, was ridiculed for being different and then became a hero when he saved everybody.

Having said that, I now realize that I have written and sold an Ignatz the Egg story. So I guess there's still some traction there.

stephen cashmore said...

Anonymous said:

"I now realize that I have written and sold an Ignatz the Egg story"

and that, no doubt, after being ridiculed for writing it. Good stuff. Perhaps you can finally give yourself a name - Ignatz!