After Mr. Deary's outlandish comments about libraries, I decided to read one of his books that I had in the library collection to see if his arrogance is justified. It is not.
The fictional part of the book is only 47 pages long, and yet I found instances where the main character, Ilya Piankoff, was called by the last name of Velikhov throughout chapter 5, and by the first name of Yuri randomly through the book. The character of Armando Diaz was also called by the last name of Moreno. Is it that hard to look through 47 pages to make sure your character names remain the same throughout the book? I was able to wade through these oversights and understand which character was meant, but children -- the intended audience -- would've been much more confused.
The plot itself is extremely contrived. The story does not flow naturally and there are forced twists and developments that I assume are meant to add to the suspense but in actuality lend themselves to confusion. I understand that children are the target audience and they may enjoy random twists in a story, but this book had too many that were not adequately explored or explained for them to be at all successful.
The historical information provided at the end of the book DOES, however, give a good overview of the topics covered in the fictional story. This is perhaps the only redeeming quality of this work.
Let me qualify that I did not read this book looking for things to dislike about it; I would've been this harsh on it regardless of Deary's comments. It was merely his statements that prompted me to read one of his works. This may have been his ploy all along -- to increase readership by making controversial claims -- but this book had already been purchased for this library years ago (and not by me, for the record), AND given that I run this library I did not check this book out. Therefore Deary did not make any more money by my reading of this book, nor did he get yet another library circulation under his belt, which according to him is so unimaginably horrible.