The great carp escape

Don’t be fooled by a nice watercolor-like cover – the illustrations inside are made on the computer and are rather ugly. The humans faces look unattractive. The father in the story looks like a woman who decided to dress up like Jesus for some reason and glued a fake beard on her face. Seriously, real men do not look like that.

The story is OK, though. It tells about children helping wild animals (carps in this instance). The message about the acceptance of someone who might look weird is an important one. But alas, the poorly drawn illustrations really kill all the joy of the book.

Also, keep in mind that the book has a lot of references to God. I feel that either the cover or the description of the book should make it more clear that it has a religious undertone, lest it come as a surprise to the parents who bought it.

Ivy in bloom: The Poetry of Spring from Great Poets and Writers from the Past

Illustrations:

Text:

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange of an honest opinion.

For this book I simply have to assess the illustrations and the text separately. The pictures are utterly adorable. The main heroine is very cute and every page is full of joy of spring.

However, the text is barely readable. The original poem by Vanita Oelschlager is mediocre at best. The next few pages made no sense to me. Why do we have disjoint phrases? And where are the “great poets of the past” promised to me?

The answer lays in the bibliography, which tells us, that those weird disjoint sentences where actually taken from poems by such writers as H.W. Longfellow and Charles Dickens. So, why are the readers robbed of the opportunity to enjoy those poems (unless you specifically go to the bibliography section and read them in a rather small font). Why are we only presented with butchered pieces? In some cases, not even an entire line is included in the main text, few words are excluded. These are not the great poems, they are abominations.

If you are looking for a good poetry book for your child, keep looking further. If you just want a book with cute pictures and do not care about words printed in it, give it a try.

Magic words by Edward Field

This books is just so beautiful! The poem is full of magical realism, but the most important part is the illustrations. Colourful, full of details, incorporating styles depictions of humans and animals. I wish I had a printed copy, you can just peruse every picture for a long time.

 

Molly rides

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange of an honest opinion.

This book tells (in verse) a story of a sporty girl who picks up a new skill, snowboarding, excels in it, and basically has a lot of fun.

I like the idea, but have some issues with the implementation. I might be overcritical, but it’s a children book, which implies certain level of expectations when it come to quality.

The text is OK. It is quite energetic, though the rhythm is not always perfectly consistent. I didn’t like the use of specific phrases like “She skied the blues and blacks”, which are confusing to the readers who, like me, never went to an actual ski resort. However, the message about spending time and effort to learn something new is good.

On the other hand, the illustrations are a big problem. Which surprised me, because I actually like the cover, at least its tiny version on the preview. All the illustrations are computer-generated 3D. The model for the main character is not that bad, but her dog look horrible, especially the texture (or lack of) its fur. What is worse, the CGI scenes were converted into the final illustrations with many artifacts (think of screenshots of a video converted into very very low resolution). Molly’s face has clear patches of green and orange on some pages.  The lighting of characters and background doesn’t always match.

In general, the book, though having an OK story, just looks unattractive and of low quality, which is very undesirable for a picture book.

Tales from Christmas wood

I received a free e-copy from Netgalley in exchange of an honest review.

I love picture books! I still remember clearly the beautiful illustrations in some of my childhood favourite, though I struggle to recall the plot. So I picked The tales from Christmas wood because I wanted to get some holiday spirit and because I liked the cover.

The illustrations are indeed adorable.the stories are a bit didactic. However, they nicely come up together in the end and remind us that it is indeed a Christmas story.

There are certain problems in the electronic edition I received. Some of the pictures appear in strange places, like the middle of publishing information. Also, there are illustrations where the characters appear on the solid black background, which looks a bit ugly. But I assume it is not the case in the actual printed editions.

Two of the chapters: A Burrow Full of Brothers and A Christmas Eve Adventure seem to have chunks of text mixed up, because the end of the chapter ends up in the middle and so forth. It’s rather hard yo read like that.

Overall: pretty pictures, not particularly exciting story, but brings the holiday spirit. The electronic version has design problems.

A Tale of Two Daddies

A nice way to introduce a child to a (potentially) controversial topic.

Not so long ago a supposedly liberal and progressive California voted yes on so-called Prop 8, essentially forbidding gay marriages int he state. Luckily, common sense and law prevailed. However, it made me wonder, what do people have against gay couples? Why do so many people feel so strongly negatively on the subject?

This book, certainly, does not answer these questions, nor it aims to. What it does, is explain the concept of two men raising a kid together to a small child. It shows how the girl’s two fathers: Poppa and Daddy fulfil the usual parental duties, familiar to the young audience, such as braiding hair and putting band-aids on scrapped knees. The book demonstrates how the unconventional family is in many ways ordinary.

Though I like the idea behind the book, I have to admit I am not entirely satisfied with the execution. The character design is cute enough, but I dislike that the drawings are obviously heavily computer-processed. I prefer hand-drawn feeling. Also the illustrations often use large quantities of magenta and yellow, too bright and sharp for my liking. Mind you, I read the e-version of the book, so it might look better in print.

Nevertheless, I feel that it can be a valuable book to read and discuss with children.

Out of the blue

Idioms are hard, both for children and for foreign language learners, because they do not make literal sense. Even if you understand every word separately, the meaning of the phrase cannot be inferred, unless you have a prior familiarity with the expression.

“Out of the blue” is a fun way to get exposed to some popular idioms related to colors. The illustrations are bright and adorable, especially ones involving animals. For each idiom there is an explanation and a usage example.

The book should be of interest to children (5-6 year old, maybe) and for people studying English as a foreign language.