Book Review: Between Two Ends by David Ward

Most readers pick up a book and hope for a good read. The same rule applies to reviewers as well… we all go into a book hoping that we’ll come out being able to write nice things about the book. We truly (or at least I do) would rather review a good book than a bad one. Someone worked very hard to write their story and took a lot of time to put it together and to get it published and I want no part in smashing that person’s career.

The other day I finished reading a story by a fellow Canadian by the name of David Ward. He wrote a little young adult book that goes by the name Between Two Ends, which is clever if you’ve read the books since part of the story revolves around a pair of magical pirate bookends.

”When Yeats and his parents visit his grandmother's creepy old house, Yeats reunites a pair of pirate bookends and uncovers the amazing truth: Years ago, Yeats's father traveled into The Arabian Nights with a friend, and the friend, Shari, is still stuck in the tales. Assisted by the not-always-trustworthy pirates, Yeats must navigate the unfamiliar world of the story of Shaharazad--dodging guards and tigers and the dangerous things that lurk in the margins of the stories--in order to save Shari and bring peace to his family.”

Now, I’m going to say this for the book because I honestly don’t have much else other than this to add to it: it was a very cool concept for a story. I loved the idea behind the characters, the plot and how everything was conceptualized to come together. I did not, however, enjoy how the story was executed. The story fell short of what I had hoped. I know that the story was aimed at young adults and general youth, but I read a lot of books aimed at a younger audience and just felt that this story could’ve been so much more.

I felt like the characters were underdeveloped and at every point in the story where something was about to happen, it all ended rather anti-climatically and it just had this overall too rushed feeling about it. I wanted to know more about the main character Yeats and his father. I wanted to know about his father and his mother and definitely more about his Gran, but the characters that I felt should’ve held a more predominant role in the story were just sort of metaphorically “swept under the rug”.

I do think that this book has a lot of potential and that the author himself, David Ward, has a lot of potential to write another story that could possibly be a bit more developed. I would be happy to read anything else that Ward puts out after this, but it would definitely need to be a bit more fine-tuned and worked over.

After all is said and done, I think I could still go ahead and recommend Between Two Ends to an assortment of people. It’s a nice easy read and for a younger audience just looking for something to pass the time, it’s not a bad story. For anyone, to be fair, it’s not a bad story… it just could’ve been better.