I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve written a book review for a book I didn’t finish. I tried. I forced my way through 100 pages to give it a fair shot and see if it was going to finally get better. But I gave up. It’s slow, and rambling, and boring, with nothing offered to make the reader care about the characters or what is happening. In reading the translator’s afterword, I learned that it was originally published in the 1930s in Poland, as a serial, at a time when little was available in the way of stories written for children. This edition does not succeed in bridging the cultural gap between 1930s Poland and 2000s America. I don’t know of any child who will stick with this book past the first 10-20 pages. When I read in the afterword that, “We shall also never know if the story ever had an ending,” I thought I could never justify asking a child to slog through something that was never even going to come to conclusion. What’s the point?