Uncle Bing

I have so many complaints about his book.

The writing is technically flawed. The tense changes continually and nonsensically from past tense to present tense. It includes words a child is unlikely to know like “embarking” and “thus” without contextual clues. There are many references to clock time without accompanying details about when it is during the day for a child that is learning about clock times. The punctuation is non-standard, particularly when dialogue appears, which isn’t great for a beginning reader. The grammar is often odd and stilted, as in this sentence, “’It has got several times our power and we can’t defeat him with our power’ said Vector.” This sentence also highlights that one of the whale children is named Vector for some reason.

But more than the writing, the way morality of these stories is unhealthy. I found myself editing the book as I was reading it, changing words and skipping over sentences to try to make the story palatable. I have quibbles about the flawed writing and weird anthropomorphism, but they're minor beside the book's cultural content.

The story told is chock full of ideas I didn’t want to present to my child. The whale children are described over and over as “naughty” and they only escape from danger consistently because Wesley conveniently half-remembers lessons from his father such as, “Never eat something you haven’t heard or seen before. It could be poisonous”, and that an octopus is somehow vulnerable to grasping its suckers firmly for some reason. I’d rather see the children escape the octopus non-violently, but encouraging kids to avoid unfamiliar foods might be useful if they’re foraging in the forest and is utterly unnecessary when dealing with a picky eater in the modern world.

The children talk about how they “didn’t have the brains” to argue, and were foolish and naughty, but how they are grateful to Wesley for his foolishness because it led to them all learning a lesson.
Next up in the book is a story adapted from Aesop’s fables, in which an ant criticizes the appearance of a chrysalis, and then a butterfly emerges and mocks his appearance right back and then Andy the ant “was ashamed of himself. He decided to be a good boy.” And learned the lesson that “appearances are deceptive”.

That’s… not even a lesson he could’ve reasonably learned from that story. The chrysalis didn’t have a deceptive appearance, and the butterfly looked beautiful after it emerged. The moral of the story told here is that even ugly things can become beautiful and that it is okay to mock people’s appearance if you know they aren’t going to change.

The version of this I told my kid was that after the butterfly emerged it told Andy, “The only ugliness that matters is ugly behavior, and that’s even easier to change than going from a caterpillar to a butterfly.”

After that I put the ebook down and deleted it.
… (plus d'informations)