Hm. Well, Fishtale is a little hard for me to rate. It's a children's chapter book, probably appropriate for kids between 3rd and 6th grade, so it wasn't as meaty as it could have been if it had been for older kids. As an adult who did not read this to a kid, I can't possibly begin to guess what kids might think of this book. I found the story to be decent, but I did feel like it was all a little bit "surface." There didn't seem to be much real depth to the emotions in this book, but absolutely, certainly, there could have been, so I think it was probably a conscious choice on the part of the author to keep this book from getting too deep and intense for kids. That's fine!I see that other reviewers have compared this book to the movies Jaws and/or Goonies, and I think that's apt; it's a meshing of those two movies, I think, and that means that there's lots of excitement, peril, and some, "This is our time" moments. There's a bit of romance (in the magic sense, not the love sense) thrown in, and the "fish tale" element of Fishtale is strong. The reader is never quite 100 percent sure if the tale of Ol' One Eye is true or just fishermen's lore.