His mother never even checks on him, allowing him to journey across town with his friends, and return, without being noticed. Overall, Archer's being trapped feels very forced. She doesn't even seem to like Archer's grandparents, for reasons vaguely explained in the last chapter. His mother doesn't seem irrational or upset. How a nine to eleven-year-old boy would meet a similar fate and therefore need to be locked up (except for school) is beyond me. His grandparents were presumed lost on an iceberg. Without ever being caught.Īlso, I do not understand, and it is never fully justified, why Archer's mother decides to 'trap' her young son inside, and why his father just goes along with it. Only in the sense that he's allowed out of it for school (where he goes out on the town to meet with Adelaide and Oliver) and freely continues sneaking to visit his two child neighbors. Yes, Oliver's father's paper is The Doldrums Press, but other than that, it's just kind of arbitrary.īecause, okay, yes, Archer is locked in his house. The title must reflect the feeling you're supposed to get while reading this for 340 pages, because otherwise it doesn't make much sense. Not because of anything particularly horrific or bad, but because I just didn't get a sense that anything.

I think of how I was cheated out of a story. So though the palette was nice and the lighting was nice, I just.

Surely no one thought this was going to compare to Brian Selznick, right?īack to the review: Okay, I wanted to give it two stars because the illustrations were competent enough, but they didn't help add any intensity to the story and the story was a huge, huge problem. For one book that is just a vague prologue, really, and for another that I will definitely not be reading because this should have been one book so that there was actual momentum. I am editing this review to say the following: After a friend of mine read this book and found the same problems I did, I went to research the deal on Publishers Marketplace and was appalled to find out that this was sold in a major two-book deal. Spoilers? If you can even be spoiled for a book where (spoiler alert) very little happens and nothing is revealed.

The doldrums book 2