Customer Reviews

The King Of Slippery Falls

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This humorous look at small town life is moving, funny, and at times sad, as our hero, Lewis Hinton, struggles to deal with the news that he was adopted. Since hearing the news on his fifteen birthday he's been self-absorped, but his life is to become even more complex on his 16th birthday when his adopted mother gives him a letter that was in the basket with him.
This book would appeal to middle school through high school, and is very tame by modern Young Adult standards. A fun, touching story, which I hope will have a sequel.

This book was chosen by my son's school as a book club selection. I can't imagine why. The plot didn't hang together, the situations were implausible, and the characters were hard to believe. The ending was even worse than the rest of the book. I kept wondering throughout the whole book what could possibly have made anyone choose this book! Yuck!

`The King of Slippery Falls' is about a boy named Lewis Hilton, living in the small town of Slippery Falls, Idaho. He is fascinated in catching a big trout that he saw for only a second in his life, and tries to catch it everyday unsuccessfully, making him the joke of the town's fishermen. He recently learns that he was adopted, and on his sixteenth birthday, reads a letter that was written for him from his biological mother. What follows are a series of incidents that he gets involved in, which somehow, very loosely, connects both the stories mentioned above.


The reason I picked this book was because I thought it was a story about finding oneself. Even when I initially started reading, the first few chapters still seemed intriguing since they involved a number of different storylines, such as Lewis trying to find the big fish, searching for his identity, learning about his birth mother etc. However, once I finished reading the entire book, I was somewhat disappointed. None of the storylines concluded with a satisfactory ending, and they just leave you hanging and thinking, `what was the point?' For instance, how did Lewis finding the fish represent any philosophical connection to his identity? Was there any significance to the `royal blood' incident in the middle of the story? One of the interesting things that I found in the book was the connection between Lewis and Amanda, and even that felt like a bummer towards the end of the story. In fact, the only character I found really exciting was Maple, and I wished she was the main character of this book, which would have made it more interesting and humorous to read.


This would have been a great book if it was a beginning of a book series, which consisted of continuing books of Lewis's adventures. However, being a single tale, it seems rather disappointing. It is just a series of incidents that happen in a boy's life that do not change his personality in anyway. The protagonist himself is confused about his identity at the end of this book, so imagine how the readers would feel!


I would suggest reading this book only if you have nothing else to do on a lazy afternoon, and would recommend taking it from the library, rather than purchasing it.

The King of Slippery Falls
By Sid Hite
This book is about a high school boy living in a small town in Idaho who struggles to figure out his true identity after being told he was adopted as a baby. He wants to find his true origin and his real name. His main desire is to fish from a ledge high above the town's main tourist attraction, Slippery Falls, and catch his dream fish which he glimpsed lurking behind the falls the year before. Using only the limited resources of the town and the help from his friends he hopes to bring home his dream catch, but it will be a dangerous mission.

This book is not a very well written. The writer does not have a good flowing plot, the events in the story are highly improbable and the writer failed to grab the readers' attention in the introduction. But most of all the ending was terrible. It made the book ten times worse because the ending left you hanging. A couple of things I can give credit to the writer is that he had good descriptive words and sentences and you could imagine most of the landscapes described. Also the book made some good points about life and how you should go about living.

I don't recommend this book to anyone who likes a book with decent writing and a story that grabs you the whole way and makes you not want to put the book down. This book would be better suited for the genre fantasy. If you like fantasy I would highly recommend the book Eragon or its sequel Eldest. I can't recommend any other realistic fiction books because I have not read very many of them.

By Anonymous

A touching, funny, and altogether entertaining story. "King of Slippery Falls" will make you laugh, sniffle, and most of all smile. Wholeheartedly reccommended.