Boy vs Beast: Mud Beast by Mac Park

In the Boy vs Beast series, Kai and his robotic dog are border guards keeping earth separate from beasts. In this book, Kai must fight an attack from morphing Mud Beasts using a variety of technology features in his hi-tech armoury. With amazing (almost magical) ability, Kai proves his skill against the mighty foes. 

This series uses many different text formats to tell the story. There are visual illustrations with captions, maps, ‘screen shots’ from computer displays and a brief section is told using graphic novel presentation. But the main written text is communicated with simple sentences - complex sentences are completely absent, so the book reads like a story from a very young writer. I presume that this is designed to appeal to male readers who prefer TV cartoon dramas with robotics and action features. Target audience - early readers 5-7 years. I am sure that advanced readers (even in this age group) who can cope with some complexity in sentence construction will find the story frustrating, but there will be some who will lap up this tech-heavy science-infused action story despite its simplicity.

Themes: Battles, Robots, Beasts, Graphic novel.

Carolyn Hull