Collinsfort Village (Joe Ekaitis)

Collinsfort Village
Joe Ekaitis
WindRiver Publishing
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*+ (Terrible/Bad)

DESCRIPTION: The small suburb of Collinsfort Village is about as normal an American town as you can get. On any given weekend, boys play basketball at the park, girls play hopscotch on the sidewalk... and, once a month, a griffin reads storybooks at the local library.
Unbeknownst to the people of Collinsfort Village, Errington Felzworth Griffin, better known as Griff, not only reads books, but writes them under a pseudonym - one that has spent more than its fair share of time on national bestseller lists. He lives in a modernly-appointed cave outside of town with Bear, a friendly grizzly who restores old cars for a living. The two are an accepted staple of town life, even if they draw a few stares from outsiders, and Griff is just as happy to avoid the rabid fans and packs of journalists who would descend on him if anyone learned he was the author of the nation's most popular fantasy books.
When a young friend, Dennis, stumbles onto a key to Griff's secret identity, the proud creature has to decide whether to fess up or find a way to keep the boy quiet. His decision sets in motion a chain of events leading from Colorado to California, through mishap and misunderstanding, to the doorstep of a dragon and the unearthing of a long-buried secret.

REVIEW: I have never struggled so hard to come up with an unbiased, remotely informative Description in my reviews. Why? The same reason this book only earned one and a half out of five stars in the ratings: nothing happens. Oh, the characters are pleasant enough, in a Fluffy Bunny story* kind of way. The fact that one of those characters is a grizzly and another a griffin hardly seems to matter (which is a shame, as it might've been interesting to explore a modern world that had to adapt to talking animals and mythical beings... a notion that, aside from Griff's trouble shopping for groceries, is pretty much ignored.) They wander around having vaguely heartwarming moments and obvious mishaps and unnatural, stilted conversations that were probably meant to be clever - the kind of benign encounters where one can't help but imagine dippy made-for-TV-movie music in the background. A dragon turns up about halfway through, bringing with him the only semblance of a plot I managed to find in the book (and a fragment of racial backstory that would've made a much more interesting tale), but the matter resolves easily enough, save some unnecessary theatrics and drawing-out by the people who resolve it. Otherwise, aside from a brief moment of tension concerning whether or not Griff would remember to flip the morning pancakes in time, there was no plot. No plot means I was at a loss to understand just why these characters existed, what the point of their aimless (non)adventures around town was, or why this book was written at all. (It would be wrong of me to suspect that the main reason the book was written was for vicarious fulfillment on the part of the author.) Maybe the plot fell out during shipping, or the fact that I read a used copy meant that someone else had already worn it out.
Bottom line: I read books to be entertained. This book did not entertain me. End of story, and end of review.

* Fluffy Bunny story - A story where every good character is equally nice, villains are obvious to everyone but the protagonists, plotlines are painfully transparent, morals are taught with glaring clarity, and anything resembling tension, conflict, or danger is strictly forbidden lest it traumatize oversensitive children (or rather their overprotective parents.)