Book Review: Big Fish Lake by Teng Rong (The Wolf Chronicles #4)

Another one of these short ones, this one being particularly short.

 In this story, an elderly Notch-tail teaches her great-grandpups to fish.

Okay, so out of the three novelettes The Wolf Chronicles produced, I'd say this one is the least worth checking out. It just isn't great. It's not bad or anything, but it's so brief and so little happens in it that one wonders what even the point is of reading it. It didn't really feel like a satisfying conclusion to this series like I'd hoped it'd be. It just feels like a cute vignette from Notch-tail's life, but not much else.

I honestly think that, instead of all of these novelettes being released separately and asking money for each of them, they could've instead been combined into an omnibus consisting of all three stories. Because these stories are just so brief and fast-paced that, even the better ones, don't really feel like a fully fledged book. So asking money for each of them separately just doesn't work as well as asking money for a complete omnibus containing all three which a reader might get more out of. Or heck, these stories could've even been published online for free or behind a Patreon or something. Seriously, I don't think publishing a story of about twenty pages and asking money for it is all that great.

Ah well, as for the story it is harmless but again I don't really feel like I got my money's worth. I've read longer, better and more detailed stories online for free. Sure, this is a cute story about Notch-tail, but I didn't get that much out of it. I do appreciate how we got to know Notch-tail better as a character, but that's kind of all the praise I can give this story (I hesitate to even call it a book). And like I said before, this also doesn't really feel like a conclusion to the series, it feels like a small vignette out of this character's life but not much else.

I also spotted some issues in this book like words being wrongfully put together lacking dashes or spaces in between (e.g. shewolf instead of she-wolf), which happened quite often. Kind of annoying when a story is this short, the author is asking money for it, and there's still formatting issues in it like this. 

So yeah, not much of note in this book worth praising. I didn't hate it or anything, but again this does not feel like a real proper story and especially not as a worthy conclusion to the series. Even the previous two novelettes, which were also short, I at least enjoyed and feel like they were telling worthy tales. This just feels kinda like nothing.

Rating: 3/5