Rube Goldberg and His Amazing Machines, the curse continues

When our boys were younger they’d receive Rube Goldberg toys as presents from time to time. They were poorly made, never worked and made us yearn for our Mousetrap game from the 1970s. Rube Goldberg and His Amazing Machines is the first in a series of books with a middle school version of the titular character. This is an intellectual property that exudes characteristics that any parent wants their child to emulate. The characters in the story are ones that kids will like also. It’s therefore really ironic that the book doesn’t connect with middle school readers.

The book is squarely aimed at that audience with Goldberg himself going into his first year at middle school. He’s a smart kid who is trying to figure out his way but has a stable couple of friends that help offset the other middle school variables that try to make things go sideways. Things like that would include bullies, school competition, strange family members, strained friendships, misunderstandings, and mysteries that only a 12-year-old could envision as plausible.

Rube Goldberg is just about to start middle school and looking forward to the school’s first annual Contraption Convention. It’s called Con Con and is seemingly custom-made for a kid like Goldberg. Unfortunately, he does something that gets him banned from the competition. Factor this in with tween friends who turn a simple misunderstanding into drama and a mystery and you’ve got the backbone of  the story.

It’s frustrating for us because everything about this character is something that behooves kids. The bugger is that upper elementary and middle school readers won’t be attracted to the book as much as they could’ve been and it’s all due to presentation. Probably the first thing that readers will recognize is the length of the chapters. For example, the first chapter is 30 pages long. Yikes, that’s a long chapter that has to work hard to capture and hold the reader’s attention. Granted some pages do have full-page illustrations, but by the time readers look at the chapter-length the damage will be done.

The second ding in its Achilles Heel is that the font is too small. It is not prohibitively small as to where kids won’t be able to read it, but it is noticeably small enough so that kids will point out that the ‘print is small’. Our 10 year-old isn’t that familiar with font yet, so he just told us that the ‘print is small’. I agreed with him.

His 12-year-old brother wasn’t as kind to Rube Goldberg and His Amazing Machines. He loves books and up until this point has read every single book that I’ve provided him. One day after I asked him to read this one he tossed the book on my bed and said “I can’t read this. It’s too slow and not interesting”. I corrected him and said that the book was boring, instead of using not interesting.

Of course, this was before I read the book and I thought he was exaggerating. Well, he was giving the book a glass half full description for sure. If the chapters in the book were shorter and the font was larger than our experience could’ve been vastly different. Perhaps it’s just that I love the idea of Rube Goldberg and the ideal packaging hasn’t hit us yet. As it stands, Rube Goldberg and His Amazing Machines will be a tough pill for casual readers to swallow. If your reader is already a major fan of the concept and able to slog through 30-page chapters, then this will be their jam. Otherwise, much like the main character, readers will put together odd parts here and there to hopefully create something that works.

Rube Goldberg and His Amazing Machines is by Brandon T. Snider with illustrations by Ed Steckley and available on Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams Books.

There are affiliate links in this post.