1 out of 4 stars
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My Unhappy Halloween: Frights by Matthew Westerfield is exactly what it sounds like - a frightful children’s Halloween story. In just 27 pages, the book follows Eddy and his friends through their terrifying Halloween experience. Everything seems normal until Eddy notices that someone has moved into the abandoned house across the street right before Halloween. The house has been abandoned for twelve years, so no one is expecting it. Suddenly, all sorts of weird events start occurring. Is it a coincidence? Will Eddy and his friends make it through Halloween?
The one plus of this book was that it seemed like a tale that might catch the attention of children. The author really spun a web of a story. There were twists all over that I didn’t expect. It is a little out there, but that’s what children would like about it. It sounds like a story that my eleven and twelve-year-old students would tell me. I’m guessing kids of that age would probably get a kick out of it.
Unfortunately, the book was not edited. There were numerous errors that were very distracting. Just a few examples were incorrect or missing punctuation, incorrect word usage, and incorrect capitalization. Since this is a children’s book, keeping the book free from errors is very important. I’ve said this countless times: children learn from the books they read. If the book has incorrect grammar, they learn to use incorrect grammar. It is essential that their books are edited well. The formatting of the book could also use work. For example, there weren’t paragraph breaks where there should have been, which made the book even more confusing to read.
Even without the grammar mistakes, the book wasn’t well-written. The author strayed from the main topic quite a bit. There was a whole chapter that really had nothing to do with the rest of the book. This made it so that the plot wasn’t cohesive; there were bits and pieces of the story all over the place. In other parts of the story, the author seemed to ramble, and a lot of the writing was extremely repetitive. Ideas would be restated several times in consecutive sentences in which the wording was just rearranged.
All of that being said, I give this book 1 out of 4 stars. There’s some potential, but it needs a lot of work. The plot is there, but it needs to be fine-tuned. The repetition needs to be eliminated, and the story should stay on track. The book also needs another round of editing. As it is currently written, I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone. While I think children might enjoy the story itself, I really wouldn’t want them to read a book with so many errors.
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My Unhappy Halloween
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