Review: Has potential -- needs tweaking
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 28, 2013
Jeff Rivera's UMM . . . MOMMY, I THINK I FLUSHED MY BROTHER DOWN THE TOILET is not an easy book to review.  The tone and subject matter suggest it's a story for young children, perhaps ages 4-7.  But the narration and use of language (and paucity of pictures) suggest an older audience.  Either way, this is a children's book that could use a good editor.The storyline is fairly simple - seven-year-old Falisha Whiskers flushes her little brother down the toilet.  She tries to use a plunger to get him out, but to no avail.  When her mother catches her at it, she insists that Falisha "Go get him!"  Which is what Falisha does.  She flushes herself down the toilet and ends up in stinky, slimy Yuck Kingdom.  After a few yucky encounters, she finds her brother (who has been having a blast in Yuck Kingdom) and together they ride back up through the porcelain to take a bath.Now little kids love anything to do with toilets, and Rivera's stinky, slimy world inside the toilet bowl would undoubtedly entertain most six-year-olds.  But there is far more text than pictures here, and the pictures that do appear don't work terribly well on Kindle - even in color, they are too small and lack definition.  This is the kind of book that really needs to be big enough to capture the imagination of children, and pictures and text should appear together on the pages.  In Kindle format, you get pages full of text, then a small picture, then more pages of text, then another small picture, and so on.Additionally, the overall style of the story is confusing.  The initial part (where Falisha and her mother argue over her brother's disappearance) is written in straightforward prose.  Falisha complains about her brother's "slobbery kisses," and how he "wipes his snot all over me!"  Later in the story, after Falisha arrives in Yuck Kingdom, Rivera's prose begins to rhyme, with a distinctly "Dr. Seuss" quality ("The hills were made of slushy gushy mush.  The streets were made of smelly jelly fellies.  The trees were swaying and fraying and graying.").  I assume this was done purposefully - things rhyme in Yuck Kingdom, but not in the "real world."  But the only examples of rhyme (even in the Yuck Kingdom scenes) are the three lines quoted above - and they are used several times, by both Falisha and her little brother.Another problem with the book is how much space is taken up with extraneous material that would be of no interest to young readers.  Before you even get to the first page of the book itself, Rivera has inserted pages of praise from readers, an advertisement for the sequel, and a link to a place where you can hear the story read out loud.  The story itself, once it begins, takes up only a little over 50% of the Kindle file - the remaining pages consist of background info on the author and a long list of other children's books he thinks his readers might like.  While this might be of interest to parents, it's doubtful a child would appreciate it.If Rivera's book is aimed at young children, he should consider publishing this in a format that would better represent his story - a format in which story and pictures take center stage.  If the book is aimed at older children, it lacks the kind of character and plot development necessary to hold the attention of those over eight.  Either way, the book needs a little tweaking.[Please note:  I was provided a copy of this book for review; the opinions expressed here are my own.]