Nostradormouse By Chris Tinniswood

Blurb: A dormouse awakens & utters a mysterious prophecy. In the centre of The Great Woods, an ancient tree receives some strange visitors. Rumours abound. Change is in the air. This is the age... of Nostradormouse. 

Reviewed by Dale

I was hunting around on Barnes and Noble looking for something to read and saw the cover for this little charmer. Catchy I thought and since my coin purse is feeling the pinch I jumped at the chance to read something popular (its in the top 100 I think) and free.

First lets get the moaning out of the way so we can get to the good stuff. There were a few too many typographical errors. Direct speech not on new paragraphs and some truncated sentences and the likes. Also my pet peeve, using too much narrative to tell the story. In fact since this great little story only clocks in at around 15,000 words it could have almost doubled that it the characters had been aloud more time 'on stage' as it were.

Ok so now on with the good bits. What a fantastic story, great imagination at play here, a jealous pang struck me enjoying this one. I think somewhere I read another reviewer drawing parallels with Aesop's fables, and I can see similarities but this is no rip off of a classic. This is fresh and original and highly entertaining. I can see this being an easy favourite in the eight years and up category. An unpredictable storyline, a nice easy build up with lots of intriguing foreshadowing of things to come. While it was short I couldn't help bonding with the hero, the young mouse on the cover. I really implore Tinniswood to re-look at this story and rework it in a dialogue driven story and at least 25,000 words. It would be awesome.

So go grab it! its great, its free, its easy to read!

Age 8+
Format: eBook
Available from Smashwords
Link to Download: Here
Price: $0.00c (at time of review)
Wordcount: 15,000 (appx)
Author:Chris Tinniswood