Sunday, July 31, 2011

Freebie Flops: The Tog & The Froad... and ... The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook Presents A Magical Christmas Menu

I love to read, but I don't always love the stuff I read, especially if it was a freebie. That was the case with two of the books I read this last week: The Tog & The Froad by Christina Ayckbourn and The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook Presents: A Magical Christmas Menu by Dinah Bucholz.

The Tog & The Froad was written in verse, but didn't seem to follow any sort of rhyming structure or verse structure that I could recognize. That made it choppy to read, and forced me to re-read some lines here and there as they didn't seem to fit properly. The story wasn't anything fantastic, and I don't think it would hold a child's attention since it wasn't holding mine as an adult. I also didn't think there was any particular lesson to walk away with. The only good thing about it was that it was short so I didn't have to suffer long... and the illustrations were kinda cute.

The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook Presents: A Magical Christmas Menu was very disappointing. There wasn't a single recipe in there that I didn't already know of (except I knew the American version as opposed to the British), and there just wasn't much to it that tied it to Harry Potter. The only redeeming quality was the little bits of history thrown in here and there in front of some of the recipes.

I have read plenty of free books that were wonderful, but these two were flops. I rated them at one and two stars respectively on Goodreads.

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