Reviews for The Mystery at Disney World

The average rating for The Mystery at Disney World based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-26 00:00:00 anthony abbott I had fun reading this book, mostly because I love Disney World. It's fun revisiting the rides. Unfortunately, however, I feel there are a lot of problems with the book. 1. The mix of education and fiction doesn't work well in this instance. A book series I'd compare it to is The Magic School Bus series. I think that series works though, because it makes sense for a teacher to be teaching her students as they embark on magical field trips together. It's a whole different ballgame when you have children visiting Disney World with their grandparents and the dialogue sounds like a parody of an educational film. The dialogue seemed very didactic and unnatural. 2. I think the author made some unwise visits to the thesaurus. In one scene, a nine-year-old girl says "I almost forgot how delectable this place smells." What child uses the word delectable? Unless you've already shown a character to be a precocious dictionary fan, the word seems very inappropriate. 3. I feel a character in the story was wrongly corrected. The grandfather mentions the Rock-n-Roll Roller coaster at Disney. Miss Delectable corrects him and says no, the Rock-n-Roll Roller Coaster is at MGM studios. Well, yes. But MGM studios is part of Disney World, so Grandpa said nothing wrong. I think what the author meant to have the grandfather say is that the coaster is at the Magic Kingdom. The book is part of a series and I can see how it might have value in making educational material more palatable for children than a dry textbook. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Right? But if Disney World is a medication, it's already sweet enough. If a child wants to learn more about Disney World, I think a straight nonfiction book would be fine.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-07 00:00:00 Brian Crumb I think this book had some good potential at the start, but quickly became fairly bland. I also thought the attitude of the characters to their siblings' disappearances was very oddly blasé, à la "Hey, my little brother is missing and may have fallen off of a boat in a dark and watery environment! Let's have lunch!" At one point just after the 2nd disappearance the kids take a ride on It's a Small World and that section turns into a matter-of-fact pointing out of each section of the ride. While the lack of real descriptive writing may be the author trying to keep it simple for a certain age group, I think more flavor was needed. I like the idea of intertwining the excitement of a trip to Disney with some sort of intrigue, but this fell flat for me. Making that intrigue a serious thing such as child kidnapping (even with a very short and poor attempt at cartoonifying one of the bad guys) really doesn't work in the context of the Disney atmosphere. At least in relation to the vision I, as a parent, would hope my kids have for Disney. What little description there was at the start became more of a drone of "where do we have to go next", and the wrap-up for where the clues were coming from felt like a big plot hole for me. Even knowing that my complaints are taken from my own parental point of view and kids may see it differently: my son kind of glazed over about half way through and we ended up speeding through the rest. If half-stars were allowed, I'd bump it up to 2.5 on a generous day. Sorry, author.