Alice Chandler

Young Anna is visiting with her Aunt Jane when she notices that a pie made by her Aunt Cassandra has gone missing. Can Anna and Aunt Jane deduce what happened?

This title popped up as a recommendation based on other Jane Austen fan fiction and I thought the idea of a historical mystery for children would be an adorable introduction to Austen for young readers. This title, like many an Austen fan fic work, is self-published but I didn't think much of that. Perhaps I should have because the quality here is so ridiculously low.

To start with the positives though -- the story itself, while slim, is okay. The plot is fairly simple but the 'twist,' if you will, is sweet. It's by no means the best writing I've read, but it's also not necessarily the worst. I wasn't the hugest fan of how the author felt the need to interject with definitions of words rather than letting children figure it out through context clues. (It was one thing if this was for period language, but it was for words like "cooperate.") However, this is more a matter of preference than a problem per se, although in general it felt a bit like the author was writing 'down' to children.

The illustrations on the other hand were laughable. Clearly the author just searched the internet for stock images. Some of them are drawings; others are photographs. Some appear to be older while others appear modern. Accompanying the mention of a poor neighbor child is a photograph that I swear is a still from the 1968 film version of Oliver! On top of all that, the quality of the illustrations was spotty at best, with many of them looking grainy or pixelated. I've seen better pictures printed by a home or office printer (which is what I suspect was used here, but clearly it was either an extremely low-quality printer or the illustrations chosen were extremely low quality).

It would have been better to be without illustrations than to be with these horrible ones, but the book probably would be fewer than 10 pages then. It was a waste of money to have spent $7 on this poorly executed book.… (mehr)