Dinah Mack

This review was previously published. It has been edited and rewritten.

This is an odd board book, as I think you can tell from the cover. The page on the left shows a photograph of a real animal, while the page on the right shows the same animal but drawn in a crude cartoon. Each cartoon has the text "Daddy [animal] look what I can do!" There is a flap at the bottom of the page and you lift it to see the animal doing something. The bear is standing on one leg, the ostriches are dancing "beautifully", the giraffe is eating leaves at the top of the tree, the elephant is squirting water in the air, the gorilla is lifting a log into the air, the polar bear is climbing an iceberg, and the lion is roaring "really loud".

Some of the activities correspond slightly to the photographed animal, like the elephant squirting water with his trunk, but as you can see some are things that the animals don't naturally do, while most of the photographed animals are simply standing there.

The pictures are cute, in a scribbly way, but I don't think a board book audience would be able to connect the cartoon with the real animal. The disconnect between the cartoon baby animal's activities and the real animal's behavior in the photographs (or in real life) bothers me also. Clavis' key to the audience says it's for 18 months and up and is about "the world" but I'm not really agreeing with that.

Verdict: Kids will enjoy looking at the animals and lifting the flaps, but there are lots of better board books out there with photographs of animals and lift the flaps that are better organized and laid out. Unless you have a big budget and are just adding more titles, I wouldn't recommend this board book. It is, in my opinion, one of those novelty books that aren't really appropriate for a board book audience.

ISBN: 9781605371702; Published 2013 by Clavis; Borrowed from another library in my consortium… (meer)

I got this book hoping for the sort of folklore exploration in the Time-Life Enchanted World series, or William Butler Yeats's "Irish Fairy & Folk Tales", but I was sorely disappointed. I found the format of this book much too repetitive, and it seemed the authors were so determined to get a lot of material in that they didn't cover any of it in much detail. In addition, it could have used better editing. The tiny section on mermaids presents selkie lore as mermaid lore; pretty much an unforgivable mistake as far as I was concerned. I admit I didn't even finish the book. I gave up on it after I read a description of an attack that included the phrase "whammed him with her mace". "Whammed"? I wasn't aware I was reading a comic book.… (meer)