'Miranda: Fantasyland Tour Guide' with art and text by Aaron L. Humphres is a book full of vignettes of a strange fantasy world.

Miranda is a tour guide and today the Deedle family are going on a tour of the land of Wondaria. Along the way the reader will see the historical house of the Kazoo wizarding family, the famed cozy cave shopping plaza, and the creaky crescent castle. Various aspects of these places are explored.

What's missing is any kind of narrative flow. There is no explanation about how or why. I'm actually fine with this, because it made me imagine some backstories for some of the areas. Imagination can be fun. The drawings are packed full of details. I think this would be a fun fantasy novel to explore with a young reader.

I received a review copy of this ebook from Action Lab Entertainment, Diamond Book Distributors, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this ebook.

I couldn't have cared less about this. Good for what it was, but not my thing. Art was fun. The rest was pretty boring.
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Miranda Fantasyland Tour Guide has some beautiful detailed illustrations. They remind me of the point-and-click adventure games I used to love playing on the internet. Unfortunately, I can't comment on too much of the story because of the overly-heavy watermarks. They began to give me a headache. I may check the book out again at some point if I can do it without the distractions.

The artwork in this looks like it will eventually be delightful. Sadly the review copy had a terrible water mark that obscured it and gave me the beginnings of a migraine from eye strain. The story wasn't much of a story at all. It was just a different room briefly described on each page. I think this book could be great if more time was spent on the mystical items. Maybe the same page as introduction and then a short story of the back story of each item and how it ended up on the tour. I did enjoy the world as it felt very close to a dungeons and dragons-esk setting to me. I just wish their had been more to sink my teeth into.

This isn't so much a story as an exercise in world building. As such, the plot is nearly non-existent; it's just Miranda, a tour guide, taking the Deedle family out to enjoy the sights of Wondaria.

The book is done in almost a graphic novel format. For each sight on the tour, Miranda gives us a brief explanation, and then we're treated to interjections from the Deedles. The various locations are certainly creative, and the illustrations have plenty to look at. However, at the end, I was left wanting more. A story set in this world could be really neat. But this book is more like one of those volumes that accompanies a series. It has maps and profiles of various settings, but there's no story; that's left to other books.

So, while I think this is a great starting point, I don't know that I'd bother reading this again. I'd much rather see Miranda (or the Deedles) starring in a story that has conflict, action, and suspense... as well as a beginning, a middle, and an end.

(Note that there's a typo on the map at the end. It reads "COZY CAZE", when it should be "COZY CAVE". Perhaps this will be fixed before it goes to print.)

One and a half stars for this effort. A lot of craft has been put into the pictures, for detailed, brightly-coloured dioramas of wacky fantasy situations abound in this book. Unfortunately, that's all you get – there is no story, beyond "a girl takes a family on a tourists' day trip, the end". What little text there is acts as caption, but half the time only tells us what the pictures have already shown us, so the interplay of visuals and words is left to flounder, often with things 'read' in the wrong order to be easily understood by the young. Take the approach to a magician's house – reading left to right on this double-page spread we see our tour guide saying the 'speedy stairs' are a demanding prospect, then her customers proving that fact, then the caption just repeating it again. Just let the visual information tell us what it can – don't drill things home so badly, would be my advice. Finally, nobody ever seems to crack a smile or have fun, which might be the 'joke' of the endless variety of this fantasy world, but I doubt it. I just think this is one to forget about.

Reading bedtime stories is my favorite way to end the kids day. And as it so happens, both the children and I love having the Kingdom of Wondaria being the last thing we read about before drifting off to dreamland. Its definitely turned into one of our best-loved nighttime stories and will be a cherished hand me down through the generations type of book. Rating it a four and a half stars from the Knight family.