Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I use this book with my students. It's not perfect, but there's not a lot to choose from. A few observations: 1) It uses European Spanish. This means some things sound odd, or even confusing, to Latin Americans like me. 2) It has errors. I purchased the Kindle version of the new edition that will be released in paper in November 2018. This edition eliminated the dragon story and added a space story about a capsule. This story seems rushed, and it not only has errors in the Spanish, but also one in the story itself. Hiring a proofreader won't hurt. 3) It contains too many low frequency words. This is most definitely not for beginners. Some words are unknown even to natives, such as pergamino in the Knight story. I re-typed part of a story into a text editor where I use a user dictionary containing the top 20K Spanish word forms. There's about 6-10% of word forms OUTSIDE THE TOP 20K! Something written for "beginners" should focus on high-frequency words instead. Anything beyond 2% unknown words becomes a chore. 4) Reading is made difficult by the names. Some stories use really odd names instead of native Spanish names. This makes reading more difficult even for natives. 5) As for the stories themselves, the first one is boring. The second one is mildly interesting. The remaining ones are more interesting and I kept reading them like I would with native materials. But sometimes you wonder if something was lost in the translation (Remember Olly's native language is English), because it can be difficult to follow what's going on.