Voigt has a talent, but it does not feel suited for kids books. She has a great arsenal of onomatopoeia and world-building, but all of it is terribly slow. This can be said for Angus and Sadie as well as Toaff's Way. These books have a lot of nothing that happens. Somehow page after page is full of nothing, clunky dialogue with a ton of sounds, long sentences to cover time passing, but nothing actually happening.

Chapters have maybe one event, things like a tree falls over, so the squirrel living in the tree continues to live in the tree. Nothing changes besides he's living in a tree which has fallen over. Another has snow, the snow changes nothing, they treat it as snow and it exists. Other chapters have him meet a squirrel, it stays for all of three pages, and leaves, changing nothing.

Toaff does not progress in the story so much as he changes location and has conversations with others. A perfect example besides the red squirrel would be the fox chapter. It is treated as Toaff fights a fox when really he makes noises from a branch and then congratulates himself for fighting a fox. Nothing was actually fought but it's held as he did so.

I can't see many kids fully enjoying this book unless it's read to them, on paper it's bland, with someone to speak all the sounds in a classroom or at bed time it could be entertaining, or annoying, there are a LOT of sounds, some of them repeat up to seven times in a scene and most of them are used dozens of times through the book.

2.5 stars, Voigt needs to write some adult fiction, her style would fit there more than it does with children. ( )

Please see my review over on my children's literature and education blog: https://www.readingrumpus.com/2018/08/toaffs-way-by-cynthia-voigt.html ( )