Negative Positive
Title: Great art, but...
Review: ...terrible writing! I just read this aloud to my 5-year-old daughter. She liked it well enough, but I was stumbling right and left over the clumsy prose. The story itself is disjointed and borderline absurd. It purports to take place in Australia, Japan, and England, though none of these locales nor their inhabitants feels the least bit authentic, and the faux-Japanese "thrump-o-moto-mini-moto" wizard phrases are simply cloying.George Sharp's paintings are imaginative and often luscious, but nowhere do they match his exhilarating work for Joy Chant's *The High Kings*, which preceded the publication of this book by three years and whose writing offers MUCH more for young and adult intellects and imaginations to savor (though it's not for five-year-olds!).
Is the review positive or negative? 