Rufolo Rants: The Howling Tower - Bear Kingdom#1 by Michael Coleman

Oh Mikey, how did you go from writing Carnegie nominated teenage novels to The Great Escape meets Winnie the Pooh? Actually that’s a bit far, Winnie the Pooh doesn’t deserve to be compared to a book this bad.

So it’s about a boy called Benjamin Wildfire on the run in a world ruled by cave bears who live a bit like how people lived in the middle ages. Yeah, it sounds silly, but I didn’t think it was a terrible idea. This could be pretty intense tale of survival and I had faith in Coleman to make it gritty and serious, without being too vulgar or graphic.

Sadly the story is not so much Bear Grylls as just unbearable boredom; I apologise that was terrible.

No, there’s virtually no forests or wilderness, no thrilling chase or suspense, instead Ben just gets caught almost as soon as he escapes from his bear owner Mrs Haggard – seriously, the names get worse – and ends up in the pound with a bunch of other human children.

Admittedly there is some excitement as they plan their escape, but the book doesn’t have the pacing or writing to make the very dull titular tower interesting at all.

So, the story isn’t great, but what about the characters? Well the main hero is one of the blandest I’ve ever read; there’s just nothing memorable about him apart from his red hair and cool name. This sort of thing really annoys me – never mind whether or not we need more strong female characters, gingers are slowly disappearing! They deserve better representation than this!

The side characters are just as bad. Benjamin basically acts as a guard dog for his bear owner and when he escapes he meets a human girl called Mops who is kept as a pet and is running away out of boredom – something we all feel whenever she starts talking. In fact, this little know-it-all is worse than that, she’s just so vain and irritating and annoying! Mops is about as insufferable as Bonnie Langford in Doctor Who!

Then there’s another side character called Spike with the stupidest voice ever. He’s like the secret lovechild of Catherine Tate and Crocodile Dundee.

As for the actual bears… yeah the names do get worse. They’re called things like Doctor Calcupod and Inspector Dictatum and you’ll probably have guessed that they speak English as well. There’s no language, nothing interesting, they just say English words in the wrong order, that’s it! These bears are so dim-witted and the cheesy childish way they’re written just makes them the least threatening antagonists I’ve ever read.

I know I’m not the target audience, I know it’s a children’s book, but kids deserve better than this. With the bears performing cruel experiments on human children, the story is actually pretty dark, but it’s all just needlessly dumbed down and sugar-coated over when books by the likes of Roald Dahl and J.K Rowling have proved that children’s books can be dark and scary and still be child-friendly, that they can have layers. Apart from a pretty good twist towards the end, The Howling Tower is just an insulting monotonous slog.

So guys, have any of you read the Bear Kingdom series? Did any of you like it? And what would you say is the most insulting children’s book you’ve ever read?