Title: The Story of the Treasure Seekers [The Bastable Children 1]
Author: E. Nesbit
Genre: Childrens, Classics
Length: 202
Rating: 2
Description/Synopsis:
When their father’s business fails, the six Bastable children decide to restore the family fortunes. But although they think of many ingenious ways to do so, their well meant efforts are either more fun than profitable, or lead to trouble.
Review – MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
I went into this book with mild interest. It had been on my shelf for ages and it wasn’t that I was ignoring it, it was just hat I have better things to read pretty much always. But I finally picked it up for the AYearAThon’s march theme of bench warmers. I was greatly underwhelmed.
The start of this book was pretty good. I liked the idea of this group of children doing their innocent ideas to try and help bring back their family fortune after their father tried very hard to try and hide the fact they were struggling from them. The ideas are exactly what a bunch of children would think of and the way they followed through with them was pretty cute, even if some of them were really stupid.
The characters themselves were alright, nothing amazing but nothing terribly dull. We don’t really get much of a view of the adults in this story because its not about them and the children don’t really spend much time with them at all. I did really like it though when we did finally get some time with their father and he begs them to not spend their money on anymore business ideas. I also really liked the chapter where they accidentally ‘capture’ a really nice robber which actually turned out to be one of their father’s friends.
The story itself though was very dull to me. It was ok to start off but when I got to about the middle, especially when I got to the chapter where the children write a newspaper, I was about ready to rip my eyes out. It was so boring. The story didn’t develop at all throughout the book and didn’t really move at all until the very end in the last few pages when everything gets wrapped up in a nice little package. Yes, the book is a children’s story, but that doesn’t give the author permission to not even try to make it a quality story. Parents/adults generally will be reading these stories to their kids and the story has to be enjoyable to those adults to otherwise the parents are not going to want to be reading that story to their kids. The story still has got to have depth and development in my opinions.
An excuse for the way that the story was written could be because the story its self is written by one of the children in the book after all these events have taken place. But the story didn’t really have much meaning. We could almost say that the innocence of children’s thinking and ways of going about things is something that adults need to connect with again to actually have a happy life and to move forward themselves, but I feel like I would be giving the book a bit too much credit if I said that.
I don’t really have much more to say about this story. It wasn’t my thing at all. If you have read and enjoyed it I would really like to know how you felt about it and what I may have been missing when reading this story. As it stands though I wouldn’t be recommending this book to anyone.
Till Next Time…
