Sammy & Scarlett’s Coral Reef Adventure by Robert Andrew Provan Book Tour, Guest Post, & Giveaway! {Ends 9/25/23}

Review By LAWonder10:

Sammy and Scarlett’s Coral Reef Adventure is a very informative and educational picturebook for children. However, I would not recommend it for very young children because it has a large amount of reading in a few places. 

It is a fantasy about a live, talking grove and sea creatures. It has illustrations on almost every page. It is a great tool to educate children on clean environment needed in the water as well as on land.

The illustrations are nice but not my “cup of tea”. The colors are dull and the illustrations of fish are simple and do not give off much energy.

The only things I feel negative about in the writing are: (1. )For a young children’s book, there is too much writing in one place a few times. (2.) It would be more educational if the fish mentioned in the story were labeled. There are a few one can determine is the type of sea creature mentioned, but many are not shown nor labeled. 

All in all, I recommend this book and feel it aids in educating children in a fun way.

I offer a Four Stars rating.

This book was gifted me with no pressure to post a positive review. This is my honest review.

Path Notes to a Children’s Book

All three of my published children’s books (plus the fourth which will be out before year’s end) began their literary life as handwritten field notes prior to being fine-tuned and typed up on my laptop in a formal manuscript format. It is not always feasible to carry a laptop on a dive boat or while exploring in the woods. A notebook and writing implement are invaluable.

Regardless of how whimsical the storyline of my children’s books may become, they are always based upon very accurate facts about nature such as species, habitat, and animal behavior. For example, Sergeant Major fish can very frequently be seen together on the coral reefs of Florida alongside Yellow Taile Snapper fish. Because I have personally witnessed them happily co-existing together in tidal pools, mangrove forests and on coral reefs depicting them as friends in “Sammy and Scarlett’s Coral Reef Adventure” came naturally to me.

The transition from field notes to manuscript format has occurred in a wide variety of physical locations. In most instances, the process revealed itself in multiple locations. For example, field notes made during the day often became the outline for the storyline in a hotel room or rental property in the Florida Keys later that same day. Weeks later, I could be found crafting this story line creating enhanced character development back home in central Florida. Still later, when at last pleased with the manuscript I began indicating where I thought images could take the place of the written word. A big deal with children’s
illustrated books.

My phenomenally talented artist Mary Wentzel would ultimately be provided with a manuscript marked up with my suggestions of where we should let artwork “do the storytelling”. I frequently defer to Mary’s unique perspective and always original ideas on the final artwork. In this last phase, our main guiding collaborative rule is, no rule other than “have fun with it”.

The finished product should be a fun, fact-based, story that carries the young readers and their families along “like the outgoing tide”.