Review+Giveaway: Ivan the Giant by Philip A. Creurer

Ivan the Giant

A middle-grade fiction by Philip A. Creurer

Ivan Morrow has spent his short life waiting for things to happen. Now something has happened. An unknown ancestor has entrusted him with something of great value and it has gone missing. But who stole it and how to get it back? He's grown extraordinarily over the last year since turning eleven, but his mind is stuck in a kid-sized brain. Now he must match wits with a desperate thief if he is to honour the trust placed in him by his distant relative.

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Excerpt

When I was eleven, I grew twelve inches and they called me Ivan the Giant. “Hey, Giant Ivan, reach my book for me!” I wasn’t liking it. I would not own it. But I wouldn’t say anything about it, either. I was a January child, which meant that I was slightly older than most of my classmates in the grade six class, so maybe my age was partly to blame, if I was looking for something to blame, that is, which I wasn’t. Nevertheless, it made me sound like some hairy beast from a nursery rhyme, a curiosity dreamed up to either frighten children or be their secret friend. I wasn’t scary and I had no intention of being someone’s imaginary friend, to be left behind when childish dreams were boxed up and put away, to be replaced by adult pretense.

My arms and legs grew proportionately, and my hands and feet too. So that was lucky. But I was never quite sure where my arms were, and my legs flayed out dangerously at inconvenient moments. Most boys have their growth spurt a bit later, so I was an exception. Not exceptional, but an exception. There is a difference.

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Review

Overall, this was interesting. Stamps were never something I’d given much thought to. I knew there was an entire world of collectors out there and that some of them might be…less than honest about their modes of collecting. An entire plot circling around this was neat, and I learned a few things along the way.

I did have a large disconnect between the writing and the proposed audience. This book came listed as “middle grade fiction,” but after only a few paragraphs, I was wondering what middle-school kid would understand the writing. There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of big words in here, words I wouldn’t have recognized when I was 12 or even older. I had to constantly remind myself I was reading a middle-grade book. A few times, the main character said something about how his vocabulary was being expanded, but even so, the writing felt too advanced for an MG audience. There were a couple of lines that made me wonder if this was meant to be the character as an adult looking back, but if that’s the case, I wouldn’t call this middle grade.

All in all, I found this different. If you want a jaunt into the world of stamps and cutthroat collecting (if from a non-cutthroat perspective), this is definitely worth a read.

About Philip A. Creurer

Philip Creurer has spent a large part of his life studying at home in Canada and abroad in France and Germany. From his origins in rural Saskatchewan, he returned to the Canadian Prairies in 2013. Long inspired by his English teachers who initiated the Prairie Writers' Workshop in his high school, he took up the passion of his younger years and began writing fiction again in his fifties. The Canadian Prairies form an expansive canvas from which his ideas and his characters arise. Philip lives in Edmonton, Alberta.
Find him online:
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Giveaway

Philip A. Creurer will be awarding a $10 Amazon GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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