A few cute and standard retelling of The Great Race Story for younger readers. A book I would share with my class.

An early read, approaching full-length size and ripe for those just on the cusp of reading such length of books – or it would be, but for some stupid pronoun mangling that reduces the clarity for the young audience. Mind you, there are quite a few weirdly-named animals doing the same thing here, for we're in the world of Asian myth. This is the tale of the race between the beasts, set up by a bored Jade Emperor, to decide who gets eternal fame and glory from being named in the lunar calendar's zodiac. It's an expanded take on it, adding in high drama with avalanches and mahoosive fires, and the ups and downs of two characters that didn't actually get to be in the zodiac – the cat, and the nine-tailed fox.

It's all designed to set up a series, where I guess more original stories continue, featuring those two and other characters (one comes out the same day as this volume in question). But I would hope for a greater level of friendliness from the others – less pronoun nonsense, less dumping lore names onto young minds without at least guiding them to the glossary first, oh, and less completely ignoring the rule about jumping, as any young reader will be wise to that huge flaw towards the end. I wouldn't have thought the original story could be turned so nicely into an adventuresome 'control your powers' fantasy drama – and I was probably right, for this is a missed opportunity at doing that, with quite poor results.