Star Wars Bounty Hunt: Lift the Flap by Katrina Pallant and Robert Ball
| Star Wars Bounty Hunt: Lift the Flap by Katrina Pallant and Robert Ball | |
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| Category: Emerging Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A flawed way to get temporary fun for the very literate young from the Star Wars Universe. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Maybe |
| Pages: 16 | Date: April 2016 |
| Publisher: Egmont | |
| ISBN: 9781405279901 | |
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If you need to give credit to the Star Wars universe for anything, beyond sheer entertainment, it may be the way it makes such great store of putting evil characters to the fore. They're often the more memorable for being in tune with the dark side of the Force, and even if we're not meaning full-on Darth Vader or the like we're talking about Hutts, bounty hunters and sheer nasty people as the focus of the stories. All in all the good guys will win the day, but the baddies have a heck of a lot more attention given them than in some franchises. And such is the case here, where we have a small episode in the life of devious and dogged bounty hunter Bossk, who was in films 5 and 6 and the Clone Wars animation, but isn't generally well-known on the street. Or in the nursery school, for this is seriously geared at the younger end of the SW audience.
Not that you'd know it at times. The text (and there really isn't much of it) can be full-on technobabble. Bossk's ship is armed with a quad-laser turret, an ion cannon and a concussion missile launcher. That's the second paragraph. I'm all for dumbing up, but the structure of this book is proof that the script is way above the intended reader. What we have is seven thick boards to turn over, making 16 pages in all, or eight large dioramas, with up to half a dozen flaps secreted about the page for us to lift. Behind them we can see X-ray like through the wall depicted into the room behind, or fully curl over the flap for a text entry, such as a definition of hyperspace, or nature notes for just what that is in the Death Star trash compactor.
Sixteen pages isn't enough for me to go in to the plot, but there is a droid, there is a revisiting of several of the more noted locations and species from the original film, and that's it. I'll credit your child with knowing that books are a Good Thing and should be looked after, and won't mention the possibility of the flaps being damaged, torn or whatnot. Production does seem to have given us something of high endurance and build quality. I'll maintain however that even if you share time over this book and help them understand what they're looking at – a really disjointed spread where it's not always clear, flaps extended or not, what is going on, and a script full of multi-syllable words – they might not be spending too much time with this book to make you worry about wear and tear.
As the first film was such a key part of my youth, I do feel a little precious about its legacy being diluted. While I know moaning about a book like this is kind of bolting the stable door after the bantha has fled, I didn't feel enough about it to want to moan. It really is worth a collection from a library with a large spending budget, for you to glimpse at once and move on, but not much more.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Wait just a couple of years and the audience for this could easily turn to The Snare (Star Wars: Adventures in Wild Space) by Cavan Scott.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Star Wars Bounty Hunt: Lift the Flap by Katrina Pallant and Robert Ball at Amazon.com.
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