Imagine living theatre. I don’t mean that you’re in plays a lot, I mean living theatre. Well, that’s the world of Beatrice Shakespeare Smith. She spends her days with Ophelia, the fairies from Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Ariel—the wild spirit from The Tempest. Her bedroom is the stage, and her kingdom is the magical theatre.

Isn’t that a wonderful concept? As a theatre person I found it absolutely enchanting. The concept get’s five squeaks. Hands down.

However, the execution was not as fantastic.

Many of my criticisms are things that could have easily been changed in writing the book, but can’t really be changed now, so I won’t spend too much time on them. In short: the plot was a little disjointed. Plot points were focused on, and then forgotten(I'll give a specific example at the end of this post, it describes the plot. I wouldn't call it a spoiler, but you may want to beware). Characters made decisions that didn’t really make much sense. And it took me about 100 pages to have ANY sort of clue as to what was going on, but it was still intriguing. Especially when the book would turn into script format. I found that very interesting. For all of that, the execution gets 3 squeaks.

And so, I average the scores and the book in total gets four squeaks. But, one plus is that it’s appropriate for just about all ages.

There isn’t much information about this book online, which was one of the reasons I was so excited to get it. I wanted to know what it was about. And I was glad that I got it. It was a good book. Not quite a Squeaky Book, though. That disjointed plot just threw me off.

HOWEVER, I definitely recommend you track this down when it comes out, especially if you like theatre.

~Enna Isilee

*Here's a specific example of where a plot point was brought up, and then abandoned. You may want to beware. This isn't really a spoiler, but it does give away some plot points.

Okay. End of plot points.

Or this:Luckily, the people buying shirts on Threadless are not as smart as you (I hope). Though I have been trying to turn that into "Nerd" I'm having only moderate success.

I'm hoping this will teach nerds to step outside the box, and show them that not everything has to be literal.

Okay... that wasn't my goal at all, but I had to think of something!

Would the lack of proper translation really bother you into not buying it? 'Cause if it does you, it will others.

*sigh* Well, I've already submitted the design. The peeps on threadless said it was good. But what do they know?

Here's what my final submission looked like:

Now I'm nervous. Way to go. ...Stupid geniuses.

;)

~Enna Isilee

This review was very hard for me to write, and when things are hard for me to write/digest, I turn them into an analogy. So here I go, making an analogy off the top of my head.

Imagine having a favorite brand of candy bar. Say… Mars. And you know that just about every other person in the world likes Mars, too. But then, a package arrives in your mail. AH! It’s from Mars! They want you to review their new chocolate (Yeah, I know. Great analogy). You’re so excited! You get to be one of the first to taste your FAVORITE candy distributor’s chocolate. Then you pull it out. It has nuts. Uh-oh. You’ve had a hard time with nuts. Crunchy chocolate kind of weirds you out, but you trust Mars. They’ve never let you down before. Certainly they know how to put chocolate and nuts together well.

You take a bite.

Hey. That’s pretty good. A little nutty (heh), nothing truly special, but good.

You continue to eat. And then something amazing happens:

You reach the nougat center.

WOAH! Nougat?! Where did that come from?

Flavor bursts into your mouth. Tears spring to your eyes, and you can’t stop them from falling. This is something Mars has never done before! How dare they change their recipe? And yet, at the same time, it’s the most wonderful thing you’ve ever tasted. You finish the candy bar wishing with all your heart that you could go back in time and try it again, because now, even if you have another of those candy bars, you’ll know what’s coming. It will still be beautiful, but it won’t be as beautiful.

You sit down to write your review back to Mars, but then you just start to cry again. So you decide to wait.

A week passes. You try to write the review, but instead you end up writing some mess that you hate and throw away.

Then, you decide to write an analogy. The analogy goes something like this:

Imagine having a favorite author. Say… Shannon Hale. And you know that just about every other person in the world likes Shannon Hale too. But then, a package arrives in your mail. AH! It’s from Bloombury! They want you to review Shannon’s new book….

You know what else I love about analogies? They allow you to be vague about the true meaning behind them, while actually making the meaning perfectly clear. They allow the reader to make their own interpretations.

Have fun digesting this one!

~Enna Isilee