My *gag* Children's Books

@dekreel I don’t have to time to give it a full beta-read, but I scanned a few pages of it.

I’ve never watched those tv episodes you mentioned so I have no dea if it was contrived… honestly, for children’s stories, it seemed well done, though. The story moves along nicely and it seems… I can’t think of another word than polished, which is to say, I can totally picture reading this in an actual lower grade kids book, as it is. (That’s not to say I would enjoy that kids book, though.)

The biggest problem with it that jumps out to me is not much tension. The characters don’t have yearnings or true struggles. That’s something you could probably change and still have it feel like a kids story.

That strikes me as a problem with all kids books, though…

@dekreel *facepalms* yeah, just realized you stated the age of the MC at the beginning, sorry.

@dekreel Of course you had to end it there!

I rather enjoyed it. Based on other books I’ve seen, I’d place the target age around 8-10. It’s a good story, kinda simple, but similar in style to other books I’ve read for the 8-10 range.

Now, I’ve never seen those shows you’ve mentioned so I can’t say anything in regard to similar plots or characters. Maybe you can develop their relationship, or lack there of, with Kevin. Perhaps some background in that area. Also, maybe you can capitalize a bit more on Jason’s fear of loud noises. The broken toboggan situation felt brushed over. Perhaps some added tension from that could carry over to when Victor grabbed Toby’s arm later, resulting in Toby trying to get away which caused the snow to fall? Just a few ideas.

But in general, I thought that the story was pretty good. 🙂

@dekreel It was actually pretty well done.  Since you’ve already had a lot of advice from others about story structure and characters, I’ll just note a couple of editing comments.

First of all, I think you need to do a little more research on helicopters.  The first thing that struck me was the large size of the helicopters you were describing.  While there are helicopters that big, it’s my belief that most people think of helicopters as small, fitting about three or four passengers, so you should probably explain that these are twin-engine helicopters with large capacity chartered specifically for this trip, or something like that.
I think some helicopters do have bathroom facilities, but you might want to look that up to get specifics.
The biggest thing was you said the flight was six hours long.  From what I’ve read (I could be wrong) helicopters carry fuel for only about two and a half hours of flight time.  Soooo, might want to check that out. 😀

I really liked your description of both the people and the surroundings.  When you introduced Jason and Victor I could immediately picture them.  The one place I didn’t like the description was when you called Toby an “African-American kid.”  That is the politically correct term to use, but it actually doesn’t make sense.  I have some friends who are from some island – I forget where, and their ancestors are definitely not African, but here in the U. S. they have to say they are African Americans.  They think that is annoying and false since they have no connection with Africa except their skin is the same color as the people from there.  So what I would say in place of that term would be “A dark-skinned curly-haired boy” or something of that sort to describe his appearance without bringing race into it.  In the same way that you would say “red-haired girl” instead of “Irish American” when you don’t really know where her ancestors came from. 😀

All in all, cute story.  Hope to read the rest of it sometime! 🙂

@valtmy I wholehearteadly beleaf you 😉