February 18, 2013

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hey everybody!  Cassia here!  So, sometimes two out of the three of us will do a review together.  Here's a review of The Hobbit by Max and I.



Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit.  What is a hobbit, you might ask?   A hobbit, according to dictionary.com, is a ‘member of the race of imaginary creatures related to and resembling humans, living in underground holes and characterized by their good nature, shortness, and hairy feet.’  So I guess you could say Bilbo is pretty special.  His perfect life is disrupted, however, when the wizard Gandalf and Thorin and Company ask him to come with them and reclaim their treasure and their kingdom from the evil dragon Smaug.  Here, Bilbo survives trolls, crazy elves, and he discovers the ring.
    He’s even more special now that he has the ring.   And it’s not just any ring, let me tell you.  This ring turns the wearer invisible.    Finally, Bilbo and his companions arrive at the evil mountain , where Smaug, and finally, the treasure awaits him.  With his strange magical ring, what could go wrong?
    The Hobbit is an adventure book.  So, if you like that, you might like it.  I say might because it really was not good.  When I read, I need imagery to get the picture in my head, and this book had none.  Also, I love good foreshadowing.  In my book, the foreshadowing should be very subtle so that you hardly even know it’s there unless you’re looking.  This book had a lot of foreshadowing, and it was bad, obvious, and made the whole thing predictable.  It was also kind of confusing.  It explains what a hobbit is, but it doesn’t really tell you exactly what world you’re in.  Usually, you can identify what world a book is in by what some people--including me--like to call ‘world-building’.  This book did not explain any of it at all.  Basically you had to know what a troll, elf, and dragon is.  You’re just kind of thrown in without any explanation at all.
    One star.

Goodbye for now and fly on,
Cassia and Max