So I've just finished reading Rainbow Dash and the Daring Do Double Dare to the kids, and thought I'd do a mini-review of it.

It's reasonably long - 14 chapters, each about eight pages of fairly solid text. This is good. The stories in the My Little Pony magazine are taken from episodes, but abbreviated down to such short pieces of text that they miss out the charming dialogue and details from the original show. With over a hundred pages of story, there's scope for a lot more cuteness.

Lots of background ponies get name checked, including Lyra and Bon Bon. Some of them actually have spoken parts.

There are some black and white line drawings, though they seem to be stock images. Not necessarily very related to the storyline. If there's a scene where Pinkie Pie is happy because Rainbow Dash has complemented her cupcakes, there might be a generic picture of a happy Pinkie Pie, but it won't be a picture of that specific scene.

Without wishing to reveal too many spoilers: everypony in Ponyville is reading the new Daring Do book, but when ponies start to criticise parts as being unrealistic, Rainbow attempts to prove them wrong by accepting any dares that ponies can come up with. When Zecora has a real problem, Rainbow decides that it's up to her, the most daring pony in Ponyville, to solve it alone.

The book also introduces a new zebra antagonist called Braze.

One minor annoyance is that Berrow keeps referring to Rainbow Dash as living in Cloudsdale, though we know from the series that although she grew up in Cloudsdale, she's lived in Ponyville for at least as long as Twilight Sparkle has. G. M. Berrow has written chapter books for all six mane 6 ponies, and has written several Daring Do books (under the pen name of A. K. Yearling), and has even written an episode for season 5, so you'd expect him to be fully immersed in the characters, and not make a mistake like this.

Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot, and the kids did too. The language was perhaps a bit too complex for them, and I did have to explain some of the big words. The book seems to be aimed at older children, perhaps 8 years plus.