Reviewed By Bobbie Grob for Readers’ Favorite

Reviewed By Bobbie Grob for Readers’ Favorite
Sammie Ellie

3 star 

Although the plot of the story is a good one, the mechanics of the book need a great deal of work. Pay close attention to grammar and punctuation. If these things are not your strong suit, find someone to look the book over for you. Many readers will lose interest in a book immediately when it is presented with too many errors. Remember that quotation marks go ONLY around the exact words that a character is speaking.

I took several notes that I hope will be helpful to the author's growth:

P. 10: The dog cannot know what the little girl is feeling as she looks at him through the window. He can HOPE that she is adoring him and wanting to take him home, and he can feel a connection to her himself, but he cannot know what she is thinking or feeling.

P. 12: Previously, the dog did not know what cars were, so he shouldn't know about something as abstract as a holiday (Christmas, in this case). He also cannot describe what the scene looks like outside the box when he is inside it, although he can describe what he feels and hears.

If you want to describe your characters, which is always a good idea, it should be done fairly early in the book, not in the middle of it, especially in a book for children.

Your first and third paragraph look as though the author meant to write one, then changed it around and forgot to delete the first thing that was written.

P. 13: The dog should not know that they're going ice skating unless he has heard the girl talk about it. Since you have no dialogue, the dog might describe what he does see and smell and try to guess what is coming, but since he is so young and has never seen a winter, he should be quite surprised at frozen water. This could be a really fun scene to write!

I hope these suggestions will be helpful to the author.