The Tannenbaum Tailors and the Brethren of the Saints (volume 2)

The author sent my thirteen year old grandson, Kai, an autographed copy of his novel to review:

The second novel of the Tannenbaum Tailors series offers a new perspective. This story picks up right where the first one left off. Christmas passes without any more trouble from the Spiritless. Jack gets a toy bullet train for Christmas. The tiny tailors decide to take a ride on the train, but Tonto misfires his grappling hook called a glimmer lift and smashes into the side of the train. He finds that he can’t reel in the hook.

Steve grapples in to save him, but just as Tonto gets reeled into the train, bugs (the size of small dogs to the tailors) blast out of the luggage compartments. When Brendan goes in to check out the bullet train to find the source of the bugs, there is a big flash, and Brendan disappears right before the eyes of the other elves. Soon after the flash, the elves find the source of the bugs. There is a termite hole that goes through a tree and deep under the house. Because Irene is the smallest tailor, she is sent in to kill the termites at the nest. Here is where the story takes a turn for the worst.
 
It’s probably worth mentioning that there is a second act to this book where one of Brendan’s crewmates betrays him and tells the police about how he told Jack (from the previous novel) about the tailors. Overall the storytelling was good, and I especially liked the author’s character development. But the one thing I didn’t like was in the first part of the book. There were no contractions in the dialogue. For example, they never say “I’m”, it’s always written out as “I am.” This doesn’t sound like a problem, but it makes the dialogue seem unnatural, however later on in the story this improves.
 
To conclude, the second novel was a huge improvement over the first. I would recommend this novel to YA readers in the 12-18 age group.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: Kai made an excellent point about the lack of contractions in the first part of the story. People in normal conversation use contractions; such as, “don’t”, “can’t” or “couldn’t”. In usual conversation you wouldn’t say, “do not”, “can not”, or “could not”...would you? yourdictionary.com says, “When writing dialogue in a novel or play, contractions help reflect how a character actually speaks.” As Arte Johnson (playing a German soldier) always said on the TV series Laugh-In, “verrrrry interesting.”