Rate this book

Too Far (2010)

by Rich Shapero(Favorite Author)

2.89 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Outside Reading

review 1: I loved the IDEA of this book... Kids traipsing about a magical forest crafted from their imagination - that was my childhood! But as a story it was a bit too psychedelic and drug-trippy for me, namely with the character of Dream Man. He was unsettling in a way I can't quite define. I also couldn't get past the fact that these two six-year-olds thought and spoke in ways that were nothing like their age! I can suspend my disbelief pretty far, but this was (yes I'm going to say it) TOO FAR. Ha. Ha ha. I will say, though, that some of Shapero's passages were very beautiful, and he captured the feeling of childhood friendship well.
review 2: I went into this book expecting it to be a sort of fantastical middle-grade or young adult read. It is certainly fantastical... more, but by the time I hit the first F-bomb, I realized that this is not a book for children. Once I figured this out, I had to shift the way I was reading the story a bit, as a book about very young children written for a much older audience.I enjoyed the writing quite a bit; it's loaded with colors and sensory details, which makes this world very vivid. The included maps also greatly assist with creating a mental picture of the environment (although why they're placed at the back of the book rather than the front, before the text of the novel, is beyond me). I also appreciate that the author presents us with very young characters who are complex people with actual mental processes who are not just extensions of their parents.That said, for the age Robbie and Fristeen are supposed to be (six years old), I think the way they speak and the dialogue between them is much too advanced. All humans, regardless of age, are mentally complicated, and obviously it's better than having them speak in unintelligible, broken English, but children that age simply don't have the language skills to speak the way these two do.The plot involving the kids' home lives was actually more interesting to me than the long sequences of them out exploring the woods, but the parents are all so one-dimensional that it made it hard to really understand them as characters. The ending is pretty anticlimactic as well. Ultimately, I'm left feeling just sort of okay about the book. I don't regret reading it, but I'm also glad that I got my copy for free. less

Download links for: Too Far

Advertising