Task: Sentiment Analysis
Input (English): Sorry, not that great, get the other books . I'm as big a fan of "The Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club" and "The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club" as anyone is.  I loved those books to death as a kid, and even today, as I re-read the first two books, they're still as funny and clever as I remember-- my memories are not clouded by nostalgia.  I became a scientist (for real) because of those two books.  However, "The Big Ker-Plop", despite a promising beginning, just isn't as good.    It starts out great: it's wonderful to be with the boys again as they go fishing on a foggy morning in Strawberry Lake, and somethign BIG falls from the sky and lands somewhere in the water... To be back on Strawberry Lake again with these brainy, energetic boys is terrific, and right away there's a mystery to solve.  The boys enlist the aid of Henry Mulligan to find the object that fell in the lake, and how they do it-- using some trigonometry and a magnetometer-- is described with scientific accuracy, believeable, clever and entertaining.  It's such a relief to have a plot where problems are solved by something other than Harry Potter's wand.    But after the boys tell the Air Force where they found the object, the plot seriously bogs down.  For all intents and purposes, the boys aren't really involved in the plot thereafter, except as observers and (maybe) engineers.  The boys just invent solutions to problems-- and they are clever solutions, described with scientific accuracy.  But the Air Force does all the "action", and the boys just watch them through a telescope as the adults try to retrieve the lost atomic bomb.  I understand that it's realistic that the Air Force would go after a lost atomic bomb themselves, and would not let any civilians anywhere near the site-- yes, realistic, but it makes for a boring story.  It's not fun anymore when the adults do all the work.    The adults are an important part of the story, and the adult characters are all paper-thin cliches (the good-hearted Air Force colonel, the hard-bitten reporter, the fat news photographer), uninteresting.  Brinley was a brilliant plotter, able to write plausible real-world stories with clever twists-- but he had a major defect as a writer: he loved to write "clever" dialogue full of ripostes and "witty" put-downs, which in fact were never clever or funny.  The adults do a LOT of talking in this book-- whole chapters consist of their dialogue-- and when the idiot mayor of Mammoth Falls is engaging in "clever" repartee with the barber or some other adult, the witticisms are so unfunny, it just makes me wince
Output (English): NEG