Elizabeth Honey

4.5 stars. Marvelous characters, exciting adventure, brilliant ubiety, creative settings. Gosh. Perfect for reluctant readers age 10-14, terrific for anyone else.

A tiny bit fantastical - no magic, and everything makes sense as it happens, but each of the few times I stuck a bookmark in I said to myself, Really, that could happen irl?!"

A little dated, with an emphasis on internet technology and a publication date of 2000, but push it on the kids as Historical Fiction and they'll be all, "Wow, what was WebTV?"

Northern Territory, Australia
Melbourne, Australia.
Concord, Boston, and NYC, USA.
Kingston, Jamaica
Loire Valley, France

Yes, all those settings, because there are actually five different kids, and some get to travel. Just so cool."… (more)

Quick fun read, esp. for MG make reluctant readers but really for anyone willing to let their inner child come play & learn.

I love the sketches that look like they may have been actually done by the child narrator (a la' Diary of a Wimpy Kid) and the photos that make this seem like a real memoir. I assume it's a novel, but it may actually be expanded from a real school camp event.

For a moment at the beginning, as Mark is introducing his friends, I wondered if someone was going to turn out to be autistic. But the characters with the blatantly 'heavy' issues were actually certain of the adults. Mostly the book reads like a simple fun adventure.

Otoh, if the child reader owns the book, and reads it both when s/he is 8 and again at age 11, nuances & depths will become evident. Different themes will become more interesting, and the reader's reactions to, say, the wisdom of some of the choices the kids make, may change.

Bonus, esp for non-Aussie readers, is the ubiety. It's very Australian, and though the casual reader will be amused by the wombats and Oz slang, a careful reader will get even more references to make it special - for example, knowing who John Marsden is makes one character have more depth.

So, the bit at the beginning that might resonate with autistic readers was cute:

In math we were doing prime numbers, and I was thinking if Jonah was a number, he'd be a prime number for sure.... Now, Wormz, he'd be a number everything could be divided into. He'd be an easygoing number 12. Me, I take the simple way, I'm 10. Mitch is definitely number 1."

I think this paragraph clearly reinforces what we already know about the boys. Mitch thinks he's the top dog, apex & primary. Wormz is friends with everybody. Jonah is the new kid - not aloof, not weird, but not into jabbering idly or spilling his guts to try to fit in. And the narrator is more defined by his role than his rather colorless personality."… (more)

Funny, charming, exciting - but I just couldn't suspend enough disbelief to enjoy it as much as some other readers have done. Mostly quite light reading - the themes/ lessons aren't so subtle one has to do dig for them. There's a token bit of drama at the beginning, when an elderly neighbor dies, and another at the end, when a bystander family seems to get badly hurt, but it reminded me of nothing so much as earlier works by [a:Roald Dahl|4273|Roald Dahl|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1311554908p2/4273.jpg] or of [b:Chitty Chitty Bang Bang|576335|Chitty Chitty Bang Bang|Ian Fleming|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1175950916s/576335.jpg|2245507]. If you can get a copy easily, enjoy - but don't bother hunting it down as I did.… (more)