Rating: Not for me
Reading Level: Early Elementary
If your young reader is ravenous for books, I suppose you could do worse.
A mouse who is afraid of nearly everything is tricked by his family into a week-long jungle boot camp designed to help him face his fears. The boot camp sergeant is a screaming lady-mouse who uses bullying & threats to force Geronimo to do scary things. I got tired of her strategy & unpleasantness. It was awful.
Things I was not excited about:
- Deception. The family lies to Geronimo. Admittedly it was for an intervention, but still not a great model.
- Bullying. The boot camp lady is an outright bully, yelling and screaming all the time.
- Name-calling (e.g.cheese-head).
- Threatening. If you don’t do what I say, I’ll punish you by…
- Lady mouse using sex appeal as a lure. It was not age appropriate in my opinion.
Some families may like it, and I might try a different Geronimo Stilton story, but this one just wasn’t fun for me.
Here is a link to Big Books Little Ears’ Reviews of several Geronimo Stilton books: https://bigbookslittleears.com/thorough-review-of-all-the-geronimo-stilton-books/
