Brain Busters: Amazing Trivia for Curious Kids

Fun for Everyone

By: Ellas Fun

Narrated by: Micaiah

Length: 1 hr and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Do you have a youngster who adores learning and exploring the world?

Do you want to keep their interest and entertained while educating them?

If so, Brain Busters: Amazing Trivia for Curious Kids is the perfect book for them!

Designed for children between the ages of eight and 12, Brain Busters is a fun and exciting way to learn about various topics, from history and geography to science and pop culture. With over 150 fascinating trivia questions, this book will keep young minds engaged and entertained for hours.

Each chapter has multiple-choice questions, providing children with a fun and interactive way to test their knowledge and learn new facts. With a focus on weird and wacky trivia, Brain Busters will surely delight and surprise young listeners with unexpected and fascinating facts they never knew.

Not only is Brain Busters a great way to keep kids entertained and help them improve their memory, concentration, and critical thinking skills, but it can also be used as a game! Parents, teachers, and kids can take turns asking each other questions, making it a fun and engaging activity for the whole family or classroom.

©2023 Ellas Fun (P)2023 Ellas Fun

Good Idea, But Poor Execution

Good Idea, But Poor Execution

I think this is a fun idea, putting a kid’s trivia game in audiobook format so that it could, perhaps, be enjoyed during a road trip, allowing all the family to join in. Certainly, some questions in the book would challenge adults. The book is set up in game format. The questions are divided into themed lists, like sports, movies and TV, and US history. Each section has 10 to 20 questions.

Despite this being a great idea, this particular audiobook has a few issues. First, the narrator mispronounces a few words, some of them repeatedly. For instance, the word peninsula is used several times in the landforms section, but the narrator always pronounces it “pinsula.” Later in the section on superheroes, the narrator mispronounces Metropolis as metro-POL-is. A few other words were also mispronounced or not pronounced quite right. The narrator, at times, also tried to mimic certain accents, but this didn't really work out as sometimes it made it hard to understand the word he was trying to say… and sometimes the attempt was laughably bad. He also referred to a South American country—I believe it was Argentina—as Argentinas. A few other word or pronunciation issues exist, but these are the ones that stuck out.

Second, some questions were repeated between sections, and some questions were even repeated within a section but with slightly more specificity in the answers. Each theme is so broad that there is no need to repeat questions.

Finally, given that this is in audiobook format, the answers to these questions should have been provided differently. The layout of each section: the list of questions with three possible multiple-choice answers and the answers (question number, correct letter, correct word or phrase). After you've gone through 10 or 20 questions, it's hard to remember what, say, question five referred to, especially when some sections had the same choices (like Incas being a possibility for several South American section questions). So if you've been keeping track of, say, the letter choices for each number, yes, you would learn if you were correct, but you might not associate the answer with the correct question. The better way to have done it for a children’s audiobook would be to restate the question while giving the answer, like “The Incas—letter C—built the….”

As this is a book for children, the errors are inexcusable. I sincerely hope that children do not learn how to pronounce "peninsula" missing an entire syllable or refer to Argentina as if it were plural! Because of this and the other problems listed above, I do not feel I can recommend this audiobook.