Jon Erdman's Reviews > Kings Island: A Ride Through Time

I enjoyed reading this overall, and the middling score isn't entirely the author's fault. Much of the content in the book is transcripts of interviews. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it makes for an unpleasant reading experience at times. Spoken-word stream-of-consciousness seldom translates well to the page and many of the interview segments suffer from this. Run-on sentences, dangling participles, the kinds of things that make English teachers squirm. To be clear, this isn't the author's fault. The interviewees said what they said and I would expect the interviews to be quoted accurately as that's good, ethical journalism. But unfortunately it's the nature of the Beast (tee hee) that it ends up being inelegant when put to paper.

In terms of the content of the book, I felt that it was slanted a bit heavily towards the newer rides and attractions, which is unfortunate because that's the part of the park history that needs a book written about it the least. A 35-page chapter about the 2018-2020 seasons is a lot. I feel like we get a lot of good stuff about the 70s, then zip quickly through the park's history until 2006 and then we get a lot of info about 2006-2020. Those attractions and events are recent and most of the readers likely remember them well. Even in the future, when what is today current becomes old, these attractions came after the advent of the internet and Wikipedia and are very well-documented already. If I had a magic wand and could change the way the book was composed, I would focus much more heavily on the pre-Cedar Fair eras of the park, as the Cedar Fair era coincides nicely with everything being well-documented online. The older eras, not so much and so they make for a much more fascinating deep-dive topic.