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Reviewed by Janelle Fila for Readers' Favorite
The Secret of Blackjack Woods by Ashlen Brown started with a bang. Right away, you know what the stakes are in the story. There is a creature in the woods, a yeti or a werewolf or some kind of crazy, creepy unnamed monster looking in the woods outside Jim's house, tormenting his family. Great start!
I also liked the dialogue within this story. Sometimes dialogue can be over written or come across as canned or fake sounding, but this dialogue was written well and sounded like real conversations between two actual people (which made the characters that much more believable). It was also very age appropriate, which is harder to do than it seems and can really trip a lot of people up. Making conversations sound like they are from young characters is especially tricky but was handled very well here. The younger characters don't sound too young, but they also don't come across as too adult like and use big words that they probably wouldn't know. Again, this just makes the characters seem that much more real because they sound like real children, not like a writer's version of what they think children sound like.
I also liked how the dialogue was mixed in well with descriptive scenes, so it wasn't just a big blob of dialogue followed by a huge paragraphs of descriptions or explanations. There was a good mix and balance here that I enjoyed and helped move the story along nicely for me.
