Stuart Gibbs

I have a couple reviews I’d like to share today — and they have something in common besides the fact that they like Belly Up.  They catch some mistakes in the book.

The first is from a website called AJ’s Clubhouse, which is run by the parent of a gifted fourth grader.  This is the good part:

Belly Up is Gibbs’ first book and it’s a good one. It’s also a particularly good one for gifted readers, I think, because it’s a smart and interesting story and the vocabulary is more complicated than you often see for this age group.

I’d like to thank the folks at AJ’s for bringing up the vocabulary issue.  If you’ve been reading the on-line reviews of the book — and I don;t know why you wouldn’t as it’s a lovely way to pass the day — quite a few people have taken issue with some of the words I used.  AJ’s refers to these as ‘minor swearing’ and later mentions that ‘they didn’t find anything too egregious.’  One of these days, I’ll write a whole blog post about the swearing issue, but for now, let me say this:  Yes, I used some minor swear words and I apologize to those I’ve offended — but every time I read such a review I think, Why doesn’t anyone ever mention all the good words I used?  Isn’t beefing up the vocabulary of children a positive thing? Well now it’s been mentioned and I’m thankful.

OK, now the bad part:

My one beef with this book is the editing. It is possibly the worst copyedited book I have ever read. And that’s saying something… The most problematic of the errors is when one of the minor animal characters changes it’s name in one chapter from Henrietta Hippo to Hildegarde.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard the copyediting comment.  A librarian also told me the same thing.  But it’s the first review to catch the Henrietta/Hildegard thing.  (Although someone else wrote to me shortly afterward to point it out as well.)  Well, that’s definitely my mistake.  And it’s pretty egregious.  (Although I would have hoped someone would have caught it before the book was published.)

All right.  The next one is one of those Reviews That Really Matter.  It comes from Logan, the son of a friend of mine in Montana though I am cutting out a slight spoiler:

I like your book Belly Up. I liked the black mamba part, when the black mamba got out. Did they ever catch it? And the part where the monkeys threw the water balloons at those people, that was funny. The boy was my favorite character. (Spoiler gone.)  That’s pretty much all I have to say. Thank you for writing the book!

Now, this might not exactly be a mistake, but Logan is the first person to ask what happened to the mamba, which is a pretty darn good question.  At some point, I thought about telling about what happened to the mamba — and then I guess it slipped my mind.  Perhaps I’ll have to deal with it in the sequel.

And finally, there’s this review from Amazon, which is actually titled: Fast-Paced Mystery for Teens: Can You Find the Mistake?

The writer goes so far as to create a small mystery, only revealing the answer in a comment, but I’ll just own it and print the mistake she found here:

While they say that it is June (p. 12), it gets dark enough to see stars (p. 187) shortly after 7:10 p.m. (p. 185)! Even if it had been the first of June, the sun would not have set until well after 8.

While I wouldn’t exactly characterize this an an egregious mistake, I have to say I’m impressed someone noticed it.  Because it is a mistake, but I don’t know that I would have ever caught it myself.  It’s the kind of thing Encyclopedia Brown would have noticed, though.  The kind of thing that would have let him poke a hole in a bad guy’s alibi and sent him to jail.

Ah well, we all make mistakes.  I just happened to publish mine.