A fun and interactive middle-grade adventure
Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Katrina Leno for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary book and media kit!
Book Information
Publishing Date: June 27, 2023
From a critically acclaimed author comes a fantastical middle grade novel about a boy determined to prove there’s more than just the weather behind his rainy town.
Oscar Buckle lives in a city where it’s always raining. And when it isn’t raining, it’s about to rain, so the townspeople have learned to embrace it. Oscar’s father is an umbrella maker—appropriate for a place where you can’t leave home without one!—but while Buckle Umbrellas are strong, reliable, and high quality, they’re expensive . Because of this, people are buying from the competitor instead, which is threatening Oscar’s family’s business.
To make ends meet, Oscar is forced to quit school and work in his father’s shop as an apprentice. But when extraordinary events start to occur in their rainy town, Oscar becomes suspicious of their competitor. Desperate to save his town, Oscar must enlist the help of his best friend, Saige, to discover if there’s more than nature involved in their city’s weather.
Book Links
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62874022
- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Umbrella-Makers-Son-Katrina-Leno/dp/0316470872/
- Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-umbrella-makers-son-katrina-leno/1142422507
- IndieBound: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-umbrella-maker-s-son/18853972
Content and Trigger Warnings
For a list of warnings, tropes, and representation for this series, check out BookTriggerWarnings.com.
About the Author
Katrina Leno was born on the East Coast and currently lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels for young adults: Sometime in Summer, Horrid, You Must Not Miss, Summer of Salt, Everything All at Once, The Lost & Found, and The Half Life of Molly Pierce. Her eighth novel (and first middle grade) The Umbrella Maker’s Son, arrives June 27, 2023. She thinks you are just lovely.
Author Links:
- Website: https://www.katrinaleno.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/katrinaleno
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katrinalenobooks/
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6549397.Katrina_Leno
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katrinalenobooks
Review (no spoilers)
If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.
Hello all! My mental health is trash and the air outside my apartment is cursed with Canada wildfire smoke, so today is a weird day. Thankfully, I was able to sleep in and relax a bit with this book and review.
Katrina Leno is an author from whom I’ve read several books prior to this one. You can even find my review of Sometime in Summer here. The Umbrella Maker’s Son is her first time writing a book for middle grade readers, and I think it showed a bit in my opinion.
The book follows a soon-to-be twelve year old boy named Oscar who is (unsurprisingly) the son of a man who makes umbrellas. They live in a fictional town where it’s either raining or right about to rain, so umbrellas are an important part of their society. When a mysterious event called the Night Circus comes to town, Oscar finds himself tasked by the circus’ fortune teller to undergo a dangerous adventure to help uncover the secrets behind the sketchy corporation that has begun taking over his town.
I know that I gave this book three stars, but it is not at all a bad book. As I mentioned above, I did think there were few things that indicated that it was Leno’s first try at a middle grade audience, and it was these things that kept me from really getting invested in the story. The timeline for the beginning of the book is a bit non-linear, with the third-person narrator talking mostly about the past, but alluding to (or even writing a few paragraphs about) the future/present a few times. I was a fan of the first few times this happened because they added some suspense, but I felt like they began taking away from my enjoyment and immersion when they persisted long past where I expected. There are also a good amount of footnotes sprinkled throughout that didn’t seem appropriate for an MG book because they segment the flow of reading. I kept thinking about how much trouble parents will likely have while trying to read this book aloud to their children because it can be hard to figure out how to insert a footnote into a narration.
Aside from my issues with the pacing/layout of the storytelling, I very much enjoyed the plot of this book as well as the characters. Oscar is a lovable kid, and his best friend Saige is just as great. They’re friendship was supportive, strong, and full of fun banter that made me laugh. The story is one that manages to tackle some tougher themes (such as class-division, money problems, greed, and exploitation) while remaining fairly light-hearted for the sake of the younger audiences.
The ending of this book teases that it could be the start of a new MG adventure fantasy series, so I’m excited to see whether or not these characters will return in the future.
Jenjenreviews 
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