Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Q: Lintang and the Pirate Queen -- I was surprised that I had a book for Q!
R: He Runs
S: Stone Age Tales: The Great Cave

Stone Age Tales: The Great Cave by Terry Deary.

Quick synopsis: A very, very, VERY simple story about a boy who lives in stone age times.

Brief opinion: This was one of the oldest books on my Kindle, mostly because of the art style on the cover (I hate it). I have no idea how/why I have this book, it seems to be for really young kids (younger than MG). It was sort of okay, but I'm very much not the target audience.

Plot: Willow is a boy with one bad leg. In a culture where all boys must be hunters, the fact that he can barely run is a big deal.

Flint, the leader of the tribe, recognizes the value of Willow's intelligence and ability to plan hunts, but all too soon Flint is killed. Bull, the biggest, strongest of the young hunters, takes over the tribe.

He's awful to Willow, up to and including threatening to kill him.

Willow's mother takes Willow to a cave and sets him up to do cave paintings to bring luck to the tribe.

Eventually Bull finds them there, and after one single sentence from Willow's mother, accepts Willow and asks him to be co-leader of the tribe.

Writing/editing: Writing was fine, but the author had an annoying dislike of serial commas.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: I hated all the art, both the cover and inside the story (every couple pages was another picture). It was so incredibly ugly to me.

I guess because this was a story for such young readers the author could get away with the bad guy (Bull) doing a complete 180 in his personality for next to no reason.

I can't believe how short this book was (62 pages, per Amazon). I feel guilty counting it.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Okay.

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DNF #18: Lintang and the Pirate Queen by Tamara Moss. I liked the setting a lot (a fantasy tropical island with "mythies" -- fantasy creatures), but for a traditionally published book this had some really rough writing and a number of editing issues. DNFed a couple chapters in.

DNF #19: He Runs by Owen Seth. Self-published. While it actually was spellchecked, the writing wasn't polished at all and the style was annoying as hell. The main character was unnamed, so the whole thing was like this:

Man contemplates letting Hound go but knows he'd only run straight for the farm house. Man slowly rises, peers over...

DNFed early on.