Sue Baker, Going Wild (The Pobblebonk Earth Detective Club), Balboa Press, 12 Jan 2016, 138pp., $26.99 (pbk), ISBN: 9781452531236
Sue Baker’s efforts in combining fact with fiction, inspiration with information and fun with frogs are tangible. She clearly knows and loves the material she writes about and is generous with detail and description as well as thought provoking questions and ideas. The grand tale of the Mathieson kids’ adventures with Granny is in places hilarious, poignant, insightful and wild. The facts Baker provides are interesting, often unusual and presented with the passion of ‘one who knows’. The ‘investigations’, ‘reports’ and ‘breakfast quizzes’ are phrased in a teacherly fashion and the content would doubtless have children eager to explore.
Unfortunately, amongst all this great content, order and clarity are seriously lacking.
The kids, who hail from Sydney, until Dad dies suddenly and mum cannot cope with their care, arrive in Frogsville using phrases like “strewth!” and “hells bells!” They ramble across conversations like they’ve grown up in the country and despite the reader being told that the kids hate the idea and will do anything to resist the change in lifestyle, they are collecting eggs and feeding native bugs at the dinner table by page 6! It is difficult to separate the character’s voices, as their turns of phrase seem to cross over regularly, and the incongruities in plot could use further editing.
There is little discernible rhyme or reason to the formatting of this book, with fact and fiction intermingled, and infrequently any change in font or layout to direct the reader’s eye. Headings within chapters are helpful, but in order to use this book as a teaching resource, a more detailed index or contents page would be useful.
Kids would love the story elements, but may well be put off by the ‘teaching voice’ in the factual sections. Teachers could use and adapt the quizzes and investigations, and even use sections of the text as reading material in a reading comprehension class. Locating and enjoying either element separately is difficult and the audiences for each are quite some way apart. Perhaps a novel and accompanying resource book would have been a friendlier format?
Overall, if you can concentrate hard enough to figure out whose voice you’re hearing and whether what they’re telling you is the truth or a darn good yarn, there is a lot in here worth thinking about.
Reviewed by Katie Bingham