Customer Reviews

Yeti or not, Here we come!: Bigfoot in the Redwoods

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This is book 2 in Leiterman's bigfoot series following The Bigfoot Mystery: The Adventure Begins. The story: two kayakers report an encounter they have with a mysterious creature to the local park ranger, Ranger Roger who of course doesn't believe in bigfoot. However, as a park ranger he needs to investigate the report so he calls up bigfoot enthusiast Ken (from the first book) on a friendship basis so Ken can send his interns over (bigfoot researchers have interns?) to join him on the report. Not only do we get the interns, one of the kayakers, the ranger, but we also get the whole Backer family (again from last book) which includes four children. Okay, here's what doesn't make sense... a state park forest ranger takes children with him on a potentially dangerous animal report investigation into the forest. I know a few park rangers and this wouldn't be allowed, maybe where Mr. Leiterman works this is SOP. My feeling is the kids are there to connect the books together and so Mr. Leiterman can pay homage and be a hero to his own children upon whom he hinted these characters are based.

The first two-thirds of the book is really not much more than a fairly well descriptive of a redwood habitat and the animals therein. It's informative and seemingly well researched. However, it's all done in conversation between the ranger and interns to the children. For some reason, during dialogue, the speaker will make a statement and within the dialogue line will be improper use of parenthesis for side notes to the reader of the book (giving word pronunciation or scientific names for example). Also, Mr. Leiterman continues to abuse the word 'mystery', 'adventure', and now horrendously abuses the exclamation point throughout the text. He also continues to use bigfoot (and now yeti) as a proper noun. The author again rehashes the same bigfoot 'every-book' anecdotes he told us in the first book.

Sorry about that, but it really takes away from the enjoyment of the book.

The last third of the book returns to Ranger Roger and his rangerly duties in which all the previous characters used in the book leave to their normal lives. After the whole river bigfoot investigation, Roger has three more sightings to investigate and the ending is pretty much a giveaway just based on the introduction of the book.

Overall, the children characters are semi-annoying but young readers of this series will like them. In general, all of the characters are flat and uninformed about numerous topics. Don't get me wrong, my kids are going to love these books because they are focused for young adults. Other bigfoot enthusiasts are going to gush about what a fantastic story this is and praise Leiterman for his book. It's readable as an adult and the author does a great job on the nature descriptions during the river adventure. Leiterman is focused on writing the stories to be marketed for children and this holds back the enjoyment of the books because they seem to be dumbed-down for young people.