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Biggles: The Camels Are Coming
Biggles: The Camels Are Coming
Captain WE Johns | 1992 | Children
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Technically, I'm too old for these books.

Thankfully, Amazon doesn't know (or care).

I've just re-read this for the first time in something like 30 odd years, and it's amazing how well it actually holds together all those years later.

Like 'Biggles Learns To Fly' (which I also re-read recently), this is more a collection of short stories with little in the real way of any over-arching plot: vignettes which, if the author is to be believed (and I've no reason not to) are all based on true stories that either happened to him or that he heard about during his earliest flying days in the latter stages of World War One.

While the character of Biggles may not be as popular or as well-known today as during the years in which the stories were written (the 1930 through to the 1990s), there's a reason why they have endured as long as they have ...
  
The cover and summary were misleading for this book. I expected stories that were related to different interesting meetings and occurrences, screwy relationships, typical teen drama.

Instead I got a very strange and rather awkward mix of sex-addicts, homosexuals, transgender, and native Americans.

I'm not saying I don't like those stories, I'm just saying I wasn't expecting it.

The above reasons are not why I didn't like the stories: those are just facts about the characters. The stories themselves just didn't seem to connect to me, I couldn't relate to any of them. Maybe it's because I'm one of those weird girls with a completely functional romantic relationship, but a lot of the content in this book was just like "uh… why are they acting like that?"

Anyway, it felt awkward. that's the only word I can use to describe it. Some of them were good, some of them sucked. Most of the writing was mediocre.

I guess all I can say is… this is probably the worst short story collection I've ever read. Sorry, I wanted to like it… It was just awkward.

*This review is copyright Haley Mathiot and Amazon Vine*