This is an interesting children’s book about William Adams the first Englishman in Japan. William and his brother Thomas decide to join a set of Dutch ships sailing to the Spice Islands. But their journey is fraught with disaster and death, until they reach the coast of Japan. The book is written in a bilingual text, in both japanese and English.

I know a bit about William Adams thanks to a family member who is a bit of an expert in his history, so I was keen to read this book to see what it said about him especially as it’s aimed at children. The book begins by showing William and his brother as they discuss joining some Dutch sailors to try to sail to the Spice Islands. But while at sea they soon encounter multiple problems, first their ships end up in a storm, blown off course many times and they end up finding themselves sailing to hostile lands before Adams’ ship finally makes it to the coast of Japan. The story does explain the facts of what happend to William Adams on his journey and after he arrived on Japanese soil, and I like how this book does explain the true facts. However the story just feels a little less exciting that it probably was intended to be and this could be due to the writing feeling a little too advanced for younger children to read.

The text appears on pages with illustrations on the other side. The illustrations are good and in an anime style. I do like the pictures, though I did feel like it wasn’t clear which of the characters was which at first. The text on the pages is written in English on the top half of the page and japanese on the bottom half. I can’t vouch for the japanese text being accurate, but it’s a nice touch to have the book in both languages and makes me wonder if japanese kids would be interested in reading this title about this famous man.

The story does continue to explain the basics of what happened to William Adams, how he wasn’t able to return home and what happened at the end to both the Shogun and him. While the story did a good job of showing the facts, I did feel as if some of this was perhaps overwhelm with the amount of information given to children, while also failing to explain certain things to them, such as what a shogun actually was when it did explain what a samurai was for example. The end of the book has some questions for children to think about. Some of these questions are good, asking kids to think about what certain characters felt or what they might have done in their place, however some of the questions seemed more like quiz questions asking kids to essentially research more about William Adams and his life, rather than giving additional facts in text format which I would have preferred.

Overall I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it is a nice book to read about the life of William Adams, what happened to him when he reached Japan and the terrible journey he and the other sailors had along the way. But on the other hand this book just doesn’t quite hit the mark for me, there’s something about the writing that just doesn’t engage you as well as it should and rather than leaving me with a story I can visualise well and think about, I am left instead with a story I don’t really remember that well due to the text not being so well written. It is a bilingual book and the illustrations are good though and despite my criticism it does have all the relavant information about William Adams (though it doesn’t actually mention he’s the first English man to have reached Japan), but perhaps this just should have been polished a little more or simplified further if targeting this towards children, especially younger kids.

From Sailor to Samurai by Jessy Carlisle was a promising story idea. I think the execution of the bilingual text and the illustrations do not help to appeal to children, especially because they are so inconsistent on the page, which makes it hard to read. I think that the illustrations are not polished. The illustrator says they drew with their fingers on an IOS app, and I think that it shows.

The story itself is very complex, and I find it fascinating. My issue is that the language and word choice does not reflect the vocabulary of a child. The ideas that are being conveyed are also not relatable or identifiable with children. So the audience of this piece is a bit confusing.

I would not recommend this book to parents to read to their children. I also would not recommend this book to adults, because I believe that there are probably more accurate and higher quality works to tell the story of William Adams.

Thank you to NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A short, simple biography of William Adams, an English sailor who was adopted by the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu during a time of trade between Europe and Japan. Simple illustrations help make the story more accessible to children for read-aloud. A nice feature is the bilingual nature of the text; with Japanese right under the English passages. An interesting read and timely, given Clavell's Shogun will be turned into a movie soon.

Oh dear. A book that wants to convey the true-life story of an Englishman who was a navigator for some Dutch explorers, who had a ruinous voyage before the dregs of the five initial boats had to ditch the one remaining ship on the shores of Japan and hope for the best. The best was that our hero became a shogun, having proven himself able to be a diplomat when it came to international trade, and a master boat-builder. That's fine, but the execution here is horrendous. The artwork is poor – supposedly manga-inflected, it looks nothing like. But the biggest problem is the text (or at least the English – it's here in Japanese, too). It just reads as if the creator has never read a children's book since of a more appropriate age for them. Characters speak as no human ever has, the bulk of it makes you wonder which was the original language and which the bad translation, and when it builds in a free lesson about Protestantism vs Catholicism, you wonder if any guiding hand has steered this to market, and what the experience of the 650 (!!!) books prior to this in this series had taught anybody.

Fair play, the author has children's books on the market aplenty, in stark contrast to my grand total of, well, zero. And it's little joy to actually give bad reviews – if only because they involve bad reading experiences first. But this package just looked like one huge lesson in how not to do things. If you too wonder how on earth a series of 650 books passed you by completely, it may have something to do with quality control...

Having read Samurai William, I was intrigued to see what aspects of his story would form part of a book aimed at small children. I think the authors have been too ambitious with this book - his long voyage and shipwreck in Japan then meeting Tokugawa Ieyasu including a discussion of European religious wars, William learning passable Japanese in 1 month(!!!), building and designing ships, deserting his English wife to stay in Japan and marry a Japanese lady and what happened after Ieyasu's death. There are also some historical terms not explained (e.g. Daimyo, the East India Company factories). That's a lot for a 5 year old to take in!

The illustrations are clearly aimed at small children, the story is quite detailed so aimed at older children and some of the questions are more advanced still. I'm not quite sure who the audience is for this work.

The concept for this book is a good one but I'm not sure it's there yet in the execution. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Thank you BooksGoSocial for accepting my request to read and review From Sailor to Samurai on NetGalley.

Stars: 2

Unfortunately this doesn't work for me. The illustrations are sketched in a color palette that is distracting. It is a cross between a sunset and fire. They are the same as on the cover. Coincidentally I didn't like the cover and marked it accordingly on the NetGalley site.

The bilingual nature of the book is English at the top and Japanese at the bottom. The print on my Kindle was demanding. Consistently I had to stop and find the English. I feel like there was an optical illusion. At no point did I freely move from page to page.

I believe the story is intriguing, the synopsis is. I struggled and missed the point. Perhaps your experience will be different. This is based on a person.

I'm all in favor of bilingual books and always pleased when the hit the market. However, I'm a little puzzled by just who the audience is for this one. The illustrations seem to be aimed at small children. The English text might work for older children. However, I can read Japanese and the Japanese text itself is really almost on an adult level. A bilingual child would have trouble reading it.
When creating a bilingual book for children, one must be more conscious of the vocabulary included and consider whether the topic is suitable for the level of vocabulary that a child might have. This seems like a patched together effort that ends up not meeting its purpose.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I wish the authors had thought it through more carefully.

A fascinating piece of history, showing the very beginnings of globalization, but its told in a somewhat plodding manner of this happened, then this, then this, without much feel for true story telling.

Meanwhile, the illustrations have a very amateur style to them, where all the people, European or Japanese, look the same, and it misses the golden opportunity to draw on either European and/or Japanese artistic styles of the time.

Very interesting story. It was a great historical summary of one man's life. I felt that this book was geared more towards older elementary or may young middle school readers as the content would be hard for young minds to comprehend and there are may good discussion points for older kids such as cannibalism and polygamy. Overall I really enjoyed the story and that it was in dual languages. The illustrations were ok, maybe it was format for the Netgalley app but I didn't always feel the illustrations matched the writing which is why I am rating it 4 stars. I do love the cover of the book though. I would recommend to select audiences.

What an interesting story! I minored in East Asian Studies and found this little saga interesting. However, the pictures were kind of odd and it was difficult to tell who the audience was. I do think there need to be a lot more bilingual books, though, because it's one of the best ways to reinforce language skills.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

The concept of a small bilingual book for children was very intriguing to me as a Japanese language learner.

The story might have been a bit too complex for children as far as vocabulary goes, though, and I think it could benefit from the inclusion of furigana to make the Japanese text easier to read for a younger audience.

Other than that, it's very promising and I would love to read more books like this one!