Cover Image: Emeline and the Golden Ukulele

Emeline and the Golden Ukulele

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Member Reviews

this was a really cute read, the characters were great and i thought the story was a good read for children or young adults.

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I wanted to take a moment to review a genre that I have never reviewed before, children’s book. It was a fast read and I hate to say, not particularly enjoyable.

Emeline is a young mermaid with a knack for playing the ukulele and she intends to play it in the school talent show. But her not so great rival, Pearl, is determined to undermine her and make her feel less than worthy of being in it any way that she can.

The moral of the story was great! The characters lacked definition and grace. However, the story could be great with some editing for minor typos and the addition of character depth. It was a hard book to maintain interest in, especially with token characters and an expected outcome.

I would give this book 1 out of 5 stars.

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This is a fantastic book for older children, which teaches some wonderful messages, such as how to be kind to others, to be friendly and helpful, to study hard, to be creative, to work with magical energy, to try your best and to never give up.

I really loved this book, which was about a girl called Emeline who is a mermaid who lives under the sea in a magical kingdom. She enters the Talented Tiara contest where she plays her ukulele beautifully, however her ukulele breaks and she has to find a replacement so that she can play again in the finals of the contest. Unfortunately, she has trouble with another mermaid who is jealous of her, but in the end she overcomes all obstacles and fulfills her dreams. Emeline has a few friends who are very kind to her and she also meets some magical people who help her. There might even be some romance in the air!

I really loved the characters of this book and the story. The magic of the book made me feel very joyful and happy. I highly recommend this wonderful book!

Many thanks to the author, publisher and netgalley for allowing me to read a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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Drawn in by the cute cover, I was expecting a simple chapter book about mermaids. Unfortunately, this is a book full of technical issues so blatant as to be a huge distraction. And the story is too weak to offer much redemption.

Emeline is a mermaid who wants to enter the Talented Tiara contest. No, it's not a contest for talented tiaras. It's a talent contest for undersea creatures where the prize is a tiara. Emeline wants to play her ukulele, but when she tries out for the contest, a string breaks. This leads her to the other side of the black rocks to borrow a sea wizard's golden ukulele, which can only be played if she has the love of music in her heart. On her way, she must try to ignore a mean girl named Pearl who seeks to undermine her confidence.

To begin with, the whole premise is really weak. Emeline's ukulele pops a string... and somehow this is a big deal. The octopus at the repair shop tells her it'll take four days to fix (a broken string takes four days to fix?!) but the talent show is in three days (except, it isn't; the author messed up the timeline). Wouldn't a broken ukulele neck have made more sense? At the end of the story, the resolution to the main character's problem is hackneyed and unrealistic. (Nobody would disqualify a contestant simply for trash-talking!)

The author seemed to forget her setting throughout the book. The text is continually describing smells. The girls eat popcorn and cotton candy at the fair. (Do you know what happens when either of those things hit water?) Emeline's mother somehow made pancakes. (How do you get the batter to stay in one place and not go floating off on the currents?) For that matter, how do you twirl a baton underwater with all that friction? And, at one point, Emeline and her friend were sitting under a tree. There are trees at the bottom of the sea?

But that's not even the worst of it. This is probably the most badly written book I've read all year. First, it comes across as a school assignment where the teacher implored the students to avoid the words "said" and "asked" as much as possible. I counted twenty alternate dialogue tags in the first chapter alone! That's extremely distracting. And, at times, the tags didn't even make sense in context. People "groaned" when they didn't seem to be particularly distressed about anything, or "cooed" just for the heck of it. Characters sometimes performed actions that seemed awfully random, like raising their hands for no reason or putting their hand on top of their head; it was almost as if the author thought there should be some sort of action, but couldn't think of anything appropriate for the moment.

And then there were the typos. Oh, the typos. "An ukulele" popped up at one point. "Weary" was used when it seemed "wary" was the word the author was going for (and, even so, I think the word she actually needed was "disappointed"). Emeline was referred to as "petty" when it should've been "pretty". And Mrs. Gills turned into Mrs. Gill once thanks to a misplaced apostrophe. I kind of lost count of all the errors after a certain point, and now I'm annoyed. This book had zero editing (and, if it did, the author needs to ask for a refund).

Had the message been stellar, I might've been willing to overlook some of the technical issues. After all, those are easily fixed. But the characters aren't appealing (Emeline is a wishy-washy sort of heroine who's easily swayed by a few unkind words that she knows aren't even true) and the resolution is way too pat (would Emeline have won if Pearl hadn't been disqualified for the flimsiest of reasons?).

I can't recommend this one at all.

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