Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

EXOSTAR (The Lost Space Treasure Series, Book 1): A Space Adventure for Teens by Rae Knightly.

Quick synopsis: A girl-slash-android is looked down on by her town, but turns out to be super special.

Plot: Trinket isn't sure what she is. Is she a girl with mechanical parts? Or an android with human emotions? Turns out the question is moot though, because she's more than any of that.

Trinket spends half the books crying out "Won't somebody think of the orphans!!!" (by the end of the book, I was ready to send the orphans to the mines myself) and the other half outwitting every adult on the planet.

By the end of this book we discover she's a super special being, she's stolen the most expensive item in the universe "by mistake", and that the "Supreme Leader" (the leader of the bad guys) is after her.

Writing/editing: The writing (technical) could use more polish. The editing was okay, but a number of basic errors were missed.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: This book is meant for ages 10+. Maybe preteens might see no issues with the story and enjoy it, but as an adult reader... wow. There were so many problems.

Almost no adult characters acted like reasonable adults. Either they were useless, sheep, or just things to get in the main character's way.

There were a ton of logic issues. Like after going without water for a day, the main character was able to "drink her fill" from morning dew.

The bad guys were so over the top bad, they were completely and utterly unrealistic. A bad guy, speaking of the main character: "And have the rest of its carbon fiber body melted. I need a deck chair for my pool."

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: 1.5. Half a star because the writing itself could have been worse, all the issues came from the story/plot.

------

DNF #10: Shipwreck (Island, Book 1) by Gordon Korman. A scan of a physical book. Unfortunately it was unreadable. Almost all of the punctuation wasn't able to be transcribed, so most periods, commas, quotation marks, and seemingly some spaces came out as black boxes.

It's kind of boggling that 2001 was pre-ebooks...

DNF #11: Little Foxes by Michael Morpurgo. The first 10% of the book was only about an orphan and how hard his life was, nothing about nature or animals at all.

It was first published in 1987, but it read like it was from the 1950s. It was a really short book, it would have taken me maybe three hours to read, but it just didn't interest me enough to keep going.