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A review by shipwrecksteph
Battle of the Bad-Breath Bats by David Bowles, Shane Clester
4.0
Reviewing an ARC from Harper Chapters.
My 8 year old nephew will freakin love this. It's about kids, who battle bats, whose weapon is bad breath. What's not to like?
Since it's the introductory volume of a series, some of the book is about setting up the characters and location. That's done fairly efficiently and then they're off to the races. It's a quick story, but the kids are all quite different from each other. So it's entertaining to see them interact. The action is a good balance of scary and silly. And there's plenty of mystery set up for future volumes.
Harper Chapters also has their eye on formatting the books to encourage new chapter book readers. In particular (I think) readers who may be struggling. There's a progress bar at the end of every chapter, 4th wall breaking encouragement from characters and a page of metrics at the end. Apparently this book has 5118 words. I think for some kids this may foster feelings of accomplishment. (I, for one, do love checking off a task finished.) I do fear others might "know what you're up to" and feel patronized. So the lesson here would be know the reader you are buying for. If these features work for them, I suspect they will work well.
My 8 year old nephew will freakin love this. It's about kids, who battle bats, whose weapon is bad breath. What's not to like?
Since it's the introductory volume of a series, some of the book is about setting up the characters and location. That's done fairly efficiently and then they're off to the races. It's a quick story, but the kids are all quite different from each other. So it's entertaining to see them interact. The action is a good balance of scary and silly. And there's plenty of mystery set up for future volumes.
Harper Chapters also has their eye on formatting the books to encourage new chapter book readers. In particular (I think) readers who may be struggling. There's a progress bar at the end of every chapter, 4th wall breaking encouragement from characters and a page of metrics at the end. Apparently this book has 5118 words. I think for some kids this may foster feelings of accomplishment. (I, for one, do love checking off a task finished.) I do fear others might "know what you're up to" and feel patronized. So the lesson here would be know the reader you are buying for. If these features work for them, I suspect they will work well.