1 out of 4 stars
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When I was a teenager I ran away from home for a few hours. I grabbed my backpack, my headphones, and portable CD player then took off. It was late at night and cold but I didn't care, I just got on the bus (public transit is still one of my favorite inventions of all time!) and rode around for a while before coming home. The experience still sits with me today as one of the meanest things I ever did, and I'd imagine it's something many parents fear their children may do one day.
It was with this history that I dove into The Adventure of Benny Franklin by Roxy. The premise is simple: a young boy decides that enough is enough and runs away from home, but finds things aren't as great as they seem outside his father's home. Benny's father is physically abusive to the point of making him fear for his life, and he frequently leaves him locked out of the house to sleep without dinner. I wouldn't be surprised if any child ran away from those circumstances, although Roxy was right and things end up far worse when Benny runs away.
I expected to see things like the dangers and discomfort of sleeping in an alley begging for food scraps, but that would've sounded like a lovely dream compared to what Benny went through. Things somehow go remarkably well at first as he sleeps in the woods, but then pirates capture and enslave him. A year passes and he finally escapes, but he ends up captured again from the mysterious island he discovered. Once more he's able to escape, but then when he returns home his childhood friend murders the woman who was caring for him for seemingly no reason and pins the murder on Benny who he doesn't even recognize after all these years.
This and more happens over the course of what Amazon calls 26 pages but was only 9 in the PDF I reviewed. In fact, the story moves so fast that years passed repeatedly within a few sentences or paragraphs. The entire story felt like a slightly detailed of a book, not a completed piece. None of the events in the book last more than a few paragraphs, which means I never felt connected to what I read at all.
I also had a hard time being drawn in because of the ridiculous number of errors I found. I typically try to count all the errors I find in a book, but when I had counted over 70 in the first three pages alone I gave up! There were so many I found myself having to re-read each paragraph; I couldn't count errors and focus on the plot at the same time. Paragraphs often had 3, 5, or even 10 errors each, and the majority of them are things that would be picked up by even the least qualified editors. I found myself scratching my head and hitting up Google at one point as well - the book is set in the mid-1800s and at one point a character makes a phone call. I looked up when Alexander Graham Bell made his famous first phone call and it was 1876, 20 years after the setting in the book. This took me a couple minutes to look up, and the author certainly should've taken the time to do the same.
Worst of all is that the plot is just so ridiculous. Having a child run away from an abusive, terrible father doesn't teach a lesson like I was expecting, aside from perhaps that abused children are just screwed and have no hope because running away means you'll become a slave, lose everyone you ever care for and be set up for murder. The end is even worse; it lacks a true conclusion and I wasn't a fan of the direction it took at all. The character depth is nonexistent so I really didn't care about what happened, even to Benny himself. My rating of The Adventure of Benny Franklin is 1 out of 4 stars; even if the book had no errors at all I don't see giving it a better score. This is an incomplete story, not even a first draft, that needs a massive amount of editing.
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The Adventure of Benny Franklin
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