AngryPages Editorial 4.1 / 5
Verdict
AI Kakutani-Style · 4.0 / 5
Tenali Tashiya wrote and illustrated this at ten years old, and the surprise is how firmly it knows its own subject. Scales is a crocodile who lives alone in a deep lake, eats fruit instead of meat, and tells his friends he intends to become a superhero. They laugh — “Ambition? You? You're just a crocodile!” — and he packs a bag, builds a rickety flying machine, and sets off for the tallest mountain he can find. What follows is a school for superheroes on Mauna Kea, classmates who scream when he walks in, a teacher named Mr. Jackson who welcomes him anyway, a cape and gadgets earned rather than handed over, and a forest fire in which frightened animals are carried out one at a time. Thirty-five full-colour pages, every word and every drawing by the same hand, with no adult smoothing the seams. Judged as a picture book rather than as a curiosity, it does the essential job: a child recognises the situation on the first page and needs to know how it turns out. Five dollars, one sitting, permanent access.
Writing
AI Wood-Style · 3.2 / 5
The sentences are short, direct, and unafraid to state the lesson out loud — a habit professional picture books train out of writers, and one children have not yet learned to hide. Watch how the discouragement is phrased: “Ambition? You? You're just a crocodile!” The joke and the wound arrive in the same line, which is exactly how it sounds at that age, and few adult authors would risk it so plainly. Dialogue does most of the work here. Description is minimal, often a single clause before the next thing happens, and the pacing moves at the speed a ten-year-old reads rather than the speed an editor would set. The laughter returns more than once — at the lake, then again at the school door — because the author understands that discouragement is not one event you overcome and forget. The prose is not polished. Its plainness is precisely why the emotional beats land where they do.
Details
AI Garner-Style · 4.2 / 5
A deep lake, and a crocodile who eats fruit instead of meat. Friends who laugh at an ambition said out loud. A packed bag and a flying machine built from whatever was available, rickety enough that a reader worries about it. Mauna Kea — not an invented mountain, the tallest one the author could find. A school for superheroes at the summit, and classmates who scream when a crocodile walks into the room. A teacher, Mr. Jackson, who welcomes him without ceremony. A cape and a set of gadgets earned rather than granted. A forest fire, and frightened animals carried out one by one, because that is the only way one crocodile can do it. Then a second emergency, closer to home, which the book does not spoil in advance. Thirty-five pages in full colour, drawn by the author: proportions shift from page to page, and the expressions stay consistently ahead of the drawing. The bag is packed before the machine is finished, which is the right order for a ten-year-old's hero. And when the second emergency arrives, the book makes it personal rather than bigger — a choice most adult picture books get backwards.
Idea
AI Sehgal-Style · 4.5 / 5
The idea is that kindness and persistence are the same trait seen twice. Scales is an outsider by design — the wrong animal, the wrong diet, the wrong ambition — and the answer the book offers is never cleverness or strength. It is continuing: building the machine after the laughing, walking through the door after the screaming, carrying the animals out one at a time because no faster method exists. A ten-year-old chose that as the moral and then built every scene to earn it, which is more structure than most first attempts manage. The kindness is not decoration either; it is exactly what makes him useful when the emergency arrives. And for a child who has been told an idea is silly, the strongest argument in the book is not on the page at all — it is that someone their own age finished it, drew it, and published it. Note also who does the laughing. Not strangers, not villains: his own friends at the lake, the people whose opinion actually costs something. A book aimed at children could easily have supplied an enemy. This one supplies a social fact, and asks what you do about it.
Reader
AI Charles-Style · 4.6 / 5
For readers roughly five to ten, and for the adult reading aloud. Thirty-five full-colour pages, one sitting, five dollars, permanent access. Buy it for a child with a big idea and a discouraging audience; buy it for a child who draws, and who has never seen a finished book made by someone their own age. The story is gentle — a fire and a rescue handled without menace — and nothing here will keep a small reader awake. Read aloud, the dialogue does the work for you, and the repeated laughter gives you something to talk about afterwards: what do you do when the people around you think the plan is stupid? Older children will notice that the drawings are not professional and that the author is their age, which is the point rather than the problem. It is a first book, and the most useful thing about it is who made it.
