This is a book that deals in an interesting way with serious topics like depressions without turning into a depressing or very sad book.
The characters are fleshed out and the author did a good job in developing the plot.
I'm sure it will be appreciated by children.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Sometimes you read a book and are just left wondering how on Earth the publisher let it go out as it is. Aubrey and the Terrible Spiders is definitely one of those books. There's three months left before its publication, and all I can think to do is to urge Firefly to pull it, or at the very least significantly rework it.

As I was sitting reading this book, the news waves are full of stories about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, of cluster bombs being dropped on civilians, of people running for their lives or desperately trying to fight off invading troops and tanks. Middle grade novels are often a comforting place to turn to in stressful times like this. So I was shocked to read the following in Aubrey and the Terrible Spiders:
"Sometimes you just want everything to be different. You want to see jet fighters screaming over the trees firing missiles, and massive explosions flinging fountains of earth into the air, and bullets hammering into buildings, shattering windows and kicking lumps out of the brickwork."
That's right, in this book we're expected to be rooting for the war. It's really quite sickening.

The book is full of imagery like this. The number of times our young protagonist wishes he had a sub-machine gun or a rocket launcher with him, because they're so cool is so high I lost count. Guns are cool, kids, being a warrior is cool, kids. It's a simple, yet thoroughly depressing message. Oh, and it's always young boys and men who grow up instinctively loving guns, because why not throw some gender stereotyping in there too?

There are, to be fair, frequent authorial notes that "Actually, war is bad" but this feels very much like the small print disclaimer, delivered with a knowing wink to the camera, as it is delivered in a very dry, statistical way after yet another exhortation that "Guns are really awesome and Aubrey wished he had a rocket launcher instead of a stick."

It's a decidedly lacklustre attempt to present two sides of an argument, especially since the whole solution to the story (and I'm not going to apologise for spoilers) is to have a big battle. For one, I'm not really sure that's an argument that should have two sides to it to begin with, "Guns and violence is really cool, but also people die." but you can't tell me that the moral of the story is that actually war is quite a bad thing, when your only solution is to have a huge battle and totally destroy your enemies.

So, that's the big, glaring, main problem with it. There are others.

How about some discrimination and violence? When Aubrey is told that a hornet may be connected to the problems he's seeing, his answer to this is to go out, accidentally bump into a random hornet on the street and to beat it up. Replace the hornet with any description of human being and you'll see how problematic and repellent the whole idea is. But in this book, it's a solution that works out for him.

How about treatment of mental illnesses? Using language sensitively because this is a serious issue that so many people confront on a daily basis? Nope, not here. Instead we get the following description of one character:
"He's flipped his lid. He's off his trolly. He's out of his tree. He's as mad as an earwig...He's as loopy as a fruitcake."
Yikes!

If you're able to ignore or set aside all of the problematic content, underneath it you'll find a book that's actually just really badly written. The use of footnotes was particularly irksome, as references were thrown in in passing, often in rather convoluted ways, which the author then felt merited a rather long explanation, breaking any flow of the text.

The ones to Helen of Troy and the Trojan War struck me as particularly unnecessary since they felt rather forced into the narrative in the first place. Again, I think this largely comes down to the need to glorify war, as these references almost all revolve around "great" battles in history, from Troy to D-Day. We can't even get a description of a wolfhound without learning about their roles in battles during Roman times.

And don't get me started on the idea that within a day of an animal revolt, we'd completely run out of meat, with fish supplies depleted by day four. That, somehow, seemed even more ridiculous than the talking wasps (which obviously followed a military structure.)

The plot left a lot to be desired too. There's a massive animal rebellion, that lasts until someone asks the animals nicely not to rebel, at which point they all suddenly switch sides. The mastermind who'd dedicated hours to setting up the scheme suddenly switches sides without any convincing arguments. The answer to everything is violence. There's an interesting conundrum set up, the kind where you can agree with someone's aims but disagree with their methods. And yet even though they are stopped, their aims are still somehow achieved through entirely unconvincing means. To paraphrase, "no one is sure how it happened, but somehow everything worked out better in the end."

Aubrey and the Terrible Spiders? In a word, terrible.