1 out of 4 stars
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"Whoever thought that you would be reading a book about the amazing adventures of a PEEP!" I sure didn't! That quote from the first sentence of the Amazon description (including the exclamation point at the end) for Little Will: African Adventure! pretty much sums up my entire experience with it. I never imagined I would read a book about tiny little 12oz birds or found a children's book that used stock photos, some with the site's watermark still on them. I also never would've guessed that the "6 pages" listing on Amazon would actually be disguising a book with over 10,000 words, yet still has no actual ending.
Little Will: African Adventure! by Ron Croft is a children's book that tells the tale of newlywed birds Little Will and Little Wilma. The two had run off to Las Vegas to be married by Elvis Priestly, and their hasty wedding was for a good reason: Little Will's friend, Blacky, is all the way in Africa and in desperate need of rescue! The natives there are starving, and they're considering Blacky as their next meal.
The story unfolded over 39 pages in the word document I read, and those 39 pages have countless wild adventures within them. The ship Little Will and Little Wilma ride is even a danger to them, as the gusts of wind from the ocean can easily knock tiny little birds overboard. In addition to winds, the two birds and a growing cast of characters face off against scary animals, a terrible bus driver, nearly becoming stew, and more.
While I'd normally consider a fast-paced book a good thing, Little Will: African Adventure! moves far too fast. Conflicts are often resolved in a few paragraphs or even sentences, and often just as quickly another pops up. The silliness of some of them - like Little Wilma saving the day with her smorgasbord of hats - is terrific, but the book really felt like a very quick, rough first draft. There were dozens of errors, the story was all over the place, and the images needed to be far better.
The first grievous error is the way the book alternates between first and third person. In one paragraph alone, "We just made it" is written in one sentence, then followed by "Little Will was mad" in the next and then "Our long hard journey" in the third sentence. At another point, in the middle of a paragraph about Little Will, a sentence says "Little Wilma here, I feel bad for Little Will" and she continues on for a bit. This is a cute idea, and with some inventive formatting this could've been terrific, but just having it happen in the middle of a paragraph is confusing and disappointing. The fact that Ron never once uses quotation marks for dialogue doesn't help either, and the slew of errors makes things worse yet.
Finally, while I can't speak for the quality of the Kindle edition or the physical edition, the word document I read did a dreadful job with images. They're all very small, and I'd be surprised if a single one wasn't a stock image or taken from a website. Sometimes the little birds are represented as real chicks, other times as cartoony animals. Some of the images are super cute and fitting, but I'm assuming Ron merely searched a stock image site for "boat" or "chicks" or "birds". Worst of all, several of the images still have "iStock", "Shutterstock", or other watermarks right on them. Others look like they were clipped to hide the watermark: one is just part of a hat, for example, and another looks like someone clipped off 90% of an emoji and used only the remaining top-left corner. Another image is actually a Pokémon, and I'd be blown away if he got the rights for that one.
I'm not saying the book is without merit, merely that it's far from complete, and likely not even legal to sell at this point. It's cute that the birds on the ship nearly get blown off because they're so light, and that when Little Will gets sick he's given a single baby aspirin pill. Little Wilma is very stereotypically female with her long makeup application times and love of hats, but it's still funny how the two of them interact, such as Little Will pretending to be sick and running away when Little Wilma has a "beautiful" hat for him. Later on, when they get to Africa, there's a big black pot that's "just right for a Baby Peep to take a bath", so Little Will hops in and natives start adding vegetables to it. That scene felt like something right out of classic Looney Tunes cartoons in the best of ways, but pairing it with an image capturing the scene would've been so much better.
Even with the few positives, this absolutely isn't a book I can recommend to anyone. I could see a parent with some terrific acting abilities perhaps pulling this off in a fun, unique way. But even then, the book doesn't have a real ending! I also have to add a few warnings I'd never imagined I'd need to include for a children's book, though. At least twice in the book, after something good happens, Little Wilma tells Little Will he's going to have a hot night, which sounds a bit too naughty for a book for little children. They never do more than hug and kiss, but it's still a little weird. Also, in addition to Little Wilma being rather stereotypically female, naming a black bird that needs to be rescued in Africa "Blacky" is a little questionable, and the bus driver named Little Pedro who speaks very broken English and does a "Mexican Hat Dance" every time he gets the chance isn't really any better. Both of these can be explained away fairly easily: how can a child more easily remember a name than using the color of the bird for Blacky and one of the most well-known Hispanic names for Pedro. If I remember anything about Speedy Gonzales from Looney Tunes, it's that he loved saying "¡Arriba, Arriba! ¡Ándale, Ándale!" and he wore a big yellow sombrero. With that said, these things can also very certainly send the wrong message in today's world. My rating of Little Will: African Adventure! by Ron Croft is 1 out of 4 stars.
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Little Will African Adventure
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