How Harry Riddles Made a Mega Amount of Money (Shoutykid, Book 5) by Simon Mayle and Nikalas Catlow
| How Harry Riddles Made a Mega Amount of Money (Shoutykid, Book 5) by Simon Mayle and Nikalas Catlow | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Another book that proves the law of diminishing returns in young franchises – but it's still fun and lively enough to be an entertaining diversion. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 240 | Date: June 2017 |
| Publisher: Harper Collins Children's Books | |
| ISBN: 9780008158927 | |
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There is a child who likes his school. It just takes him to be fictional for that comment to be true. Yes, while the building is way above his older sister in Harry's estimation, and while school is way below his enjoyment of playing zombie games, he likes it. He likes it enough to worry about it being forced to close when there's a heinous sum of £7,000 to be made up – but does he like anything profitable enough to make sure he can get the place saved?
I found a new addition to this series at this fifth time of asking – naivety. It's a little naïve, surely, to build a plot around saving a school, when so much of the books before now have worked to make Harry recognisable, and likeable. It's also a little silly that it's such a piddly sum. But there were other things, as well, such as the world-building away from the main plot – Harry's cousin is gearing up to a lacrosse championship, whose result we never learn, a house move is wrapped up completely pat, and so on – that made me frown. Yes, concision can be found to be a good thing – when a female friend also moves away the resulting text conversation is very droll in its brevity – but a few times I wondered if the paring down in the editing stage hadn't taken too much out.
But to talk of what is still in – it's still given a brio and liveliness to inspire the reluctant reader, from several angles. For one the chapter breaks are two if not three full pages, meaning the resulting illustrations make the pages flip by really quite quickly (this is not a dense read). Second, there is the narrative style, which makes the book entirely – and entirely successfully – out of email conversations, threaded text messages, web chat screens, and so on. That makes for more blank white on each page, but the lack of authorial narration is once more distinctive, and decently done. Third, there is the return to the letters Harry writes to celebrities, from Elon Musk to Mary Berry, as he tries to do what's best.
And the way that 'best' is tied in to Harry's world of computer gaming is the key to any youngster liking this book. The game has progressed from earlier volumes, and is now one of those Poke-hunt things overlaying CG characters on the real universe, and the drama of that is used well with some mildly amusing scenes throughout. It means that there is still the character of this series, the very individuality I enjoyed so much with earlier volumes like the second, but I did wonder too often here if the series was zombiefying itself, and in search of more in the way of brains.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
The series began here.
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You can read more book reviews or buy How Harry Riddles Made a Mega Amount of Money (Shoutykid, Book 5) by Simon Mayle and Nikalas Catlow at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy How Harry Riddles Made a Mega Amount of Money (Shoutykid, Book 5) by Simon Mayle and Nikalas Catlow at Amazon.com.
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