Our First Book Review

Often one only gets a genuine insight into how things work in the big wide world after actively attempting something. I have learned that reviews from the blogsphere are both precious and are not easy to come by especially for a first timer like me.

So, you can imagine my delight when Mikayla Gray from www.mikaylasbookshelf.blogspot.co.uk answered an email that I sent her and agreed to give us a review.

Mikayla's words:

I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I wasn’t sure this book was going to my cup of tea. A story about warring squirrel factions isn’t typically the sort of thing I’d pick up. It sounds like an odd sell on the surface. The most obvious (and perhaps lazy!) comparison is to Watership Down, which I was forced to read for my GCSEs and don’t exactly hold fond memories of. That said, I quite enjoyed TGoCC. The story itself may have seemed somewhat bizarre for a devourer of traditional fantasy such as myself, but I could tell I was reading a passion project from the author.

It’s hard who to know who to recommend this book to or where to shelve it. On the surface, the book blub almost makes it sound like a children’s story, and using animal characters in lieu of human protagonists certainly reinforces this, but the subject matter isn’t really suitable for kids. The story itself – of family, belonging and fighting for your place in the world – is very much a cautionary tale for younger readers, but the writing style and some of the content is more geared towards older readers. It’s this confusion which made the book something of an oddity for me. But still, it was one I found myself enjoying. Perhaps it was the originality of the book. Perhaps it was the relative simplicity of the story, even though it was like nothing I'd read in the best part of a decade. Or perhaps it was how an animal-based fantasy managed to play to both my inner child and my outer "adult" in one book.

TGoCC is a very well-written, thoughtfully out together book, but one that suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. Still, it's worth checking out. I can pretty much guarantee you won't have read anything like it in a while. Unless you happen to have picked up Watership Down recently...

 Mikayla gave the book a 4 star rating and her comments were insightful. 

Thank you Mikayla!