Review: Feed the Beast

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Author: Michael Anthony Steele

Title: Feed the Beast (Open World Squad)

ISBN: 9781669031703

Genre: Children's Book

Publisher: Capstone Press, 2024

Page Count: 72 pages

Synopsis from Publisher: The gamer squad must face a fierce dragon in an Open World fantasy level! Thirteen-year-old Mason guides his friends as they collect ingredients for a meal that's key to beating the beast. But IRL, his leadership skills have no effect on his little brother. Tasked with making supper while their parents work evenings, Mason battles to please the eight-year-old and is struggling to keep his cool. With help from his squad, can Mason find victory dealing with the dragon and his sibling? Game on with Open World Squad, an illustrated hi-lo chapter book series featuring exciting video game action and a winning mix of easy-to-read narrative text and in-game chat conversations.

What has an interesting premise falls short of its goals. Interestingly, the publishing site labels this as a book whose interest level targets 4-6 graders, but the reading level is 2-3 graders.

Anyone would know these are vastly different age groups, and I don't think this book can reach either range too well. Perhaps the younger second grade crowd, but even then, I found the book to be too boring to hold a child's attention without quite a lot of finesse from a tutor, parent, or teacher putting in the effort to make it exciting.

For a story about an open-world MMORPG, this book doesn't touch much of the world. It's an incredibly short book, just barely setting the scene for any gaming experience. You aren't ever immersed in it, there's very little detail about what the world feels like or looks like, and the game is spoken about in the vaguest terms. A major tenant of reading comprehension for this age range relies on illustrious prose to nurture the ability for a young reader to picture the setting and action in their mind and be able to discuss it thoroughly to show their comprehension and thoughtfulness about the media they're consuming. These are skills that any storyteller should want to foster with their audience, but particularly a children's author should want to nurture this the most. Only another MMORPG gamer would be able to fill in the blanks and create an image in their head for what OW (the game) is supposed to be like for players.

At this, it's worth pointing out most children in the aforementioned age ranges won't quite connect with that online experience to fill in any gaps. Some parents might allow their young children to play Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite online, but these experiences don't even scratch the surface of true open-world MMORPGs. Had Steele wanted to draw a picture of what this game truly could be, and the life these kids had in it, he could have taken the extra care to do so. Instead, it felt like a shortcut to push out multiple books with little effort.

Feed the Beast feels like a half- or quarter-formed kid's version of Ready Player One with none of the "IRL" intrigue to round out the characters and their draw towards an immersive world like OW is supposed to be. The characters were very basic with hardly any real personality outside of "Mason doesn't get along with his little brother" and "there are skeletons in the game". The integration of in-game chat throughout the story is an interesting touch, but it risks so much in doing so.

For the age ranges this targets (or at least was scaled to target), you're doing a major disservice to the children by complicating their reading experience with an abundance of chat-speak and abbreviations - most of which aren't even truly used in most gaming experiences or enough that an online kiddo would know what they're looking at. This age range does demand some concern for literacy and adaptivity of language. With such simplistic, dull storytelling to then be interrupted with this chat-speak, I highly doubt that a second or third grader is going to inherit any positive reading and writing comprehension from the story. While there is something to be said, linguistically, for the adaptation of online slang, I believe that's a high enough concept to perhaps leave for maybe the sixth grader that would be more inclined to pick up a book about an MMORPG. However, that sixth grader will be disappointed by this book in doing so.

Because of the flat world, dull story and "conflict," incredibly short length, and very generic characters, Feed the Beast does very little to tell a story that warrants being even a tiny chapter book. At best, it reads like some of the most generic picture books I've read out loud to my students, and most of those picture books have sought to do more: expose students to different languages, cultures, and grounded and real-world conflicts. Even the conflict here was fairly generic (a little brother being a pain while the older brother deals with their mom and dad always being busy with work and having to take care of things in their stead). Low stakes conflict in a simple children's story doesn't have to be a bad thing, but when Mason's predicament is described as "hopeless" it felt like a strange hyperbole to take on for something so easily fixable in his world. Perhaps if Steele hadn't used the word "hopeless" to describe sibling issues, or had done more to make us care for Mason and Devon, this wouldn't have fallen so flat. But even when we pivot to the in-game conflicts, those stakes feel incredibly low because nothing is done to make us really see and experience this world through these characters. It felt like the type of story where because you say there are monsters, the kids during read-along time are just supposed to gasp and play along without the drama being earned.

Children don't have to be exposed to heavy bouts of trauma in their literature, but they are far more capable of understanding, learning, and sympathizing with more sincere conflicts in stories. In fact, most delight in having something to emote about. Feed the Beast isn't going to be the story to give them any of that, though.

I would love to see someone take a shot at writing something more creatively immersive, more meaningful and engaging prose for the readers, and with well-rounded characters who experience a full rising action, climax, and satisfying resolution. At the very least, perhaps Feed the Beast could have been more successful with time taken to pull the readers in through a different format, such as a younger-grades graphic novel.