There are paragraphs and paragraphs of detailed description that add nothing to the story and actually caused me to zone out. This is a sweet story, but this book should have been half as long. I would have dropped it around page 100, but I was reading it aloud to my kids and they liked it more than I did, so we plowed through-which took two months! Way longer than it ever takes us to read a book. We only hung on with this one to find out what happened. We will not be reading any more books in this series. We read a Beverly Cleary book at the same time, and the contrast was stark regarding the authors’ understanding of children, ability to tell a fun story, and ability to develop characters. Plus, there are several typos, and despite the pages of description, the author doesn’t address obvious questions, like how do Growly and Chippy go to the bathroom when they’re on their boating trip down the river for several days? The character development is nil, and the plot is boring. The editing was very poor-the pacing is inconsistent, the descriptions are elaborate, over the top, and don’t add meaning to the story. And after 234 pages, he does not find the friend and seems no closer to doing so. He encounters folks who knew the friend and has life-threatening adventures. The gist of the story is that an adolescent bear leaves home to go on his coming-of-age adventure and decides to try to find his grandpa’s best friend who went missing on his own adventure years ago. First of all, it should have been half the length it is. I hate to say it, but this book was a waste of time. This book would be appropriate for a family read-aloud, but I think I will prefer to save it for strong readers to read independently, and save my read-aloud voice for books with a little more texture. He thought it was a fun adventure story and was more invested in the characters than I was. My son read it a few months ago and loved it. It was a little too sweet and simple for my preferences, but I absolutely feel comfortable handing it to my children who are strong readers. They are looking forward to beginning their own families in the future, and Growly realizes over the course of the book that he has come to love his best friend in a way that means that he wants to marry her and share his life with her. There are hints of "romance" in that Growly and his friends are coming of age. There are strong themes of family, friendship, loyalty, service, and perseverance in the face of great obstacles. I kept expecting a betrayal or something (told you, jaded) but nothing of that sort ever happened, at least not in the first book. It definitely hits the "innocent" mark, perhaps a little too well for a jaded adult like me (haha).
It was written for that in-between crowd-strong readers who are still very innocent.
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