Review: The Gruffalo

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Title: The Gruffalo (website)
Author: Julia Donaldson (website)
Illustrator: Axel Scheffler
Publisher: Macmillan Children's
Year: 2001
ISBN: 978-0333710937
Format: Paperback, also available in Hardcover and Board Book
Pages: 32
Age Range: Toddler, Preschooler, Early Reader
Kid Love Factor: 5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 4/5

The Gruffalo starts with your average, everyday, (talking) mouse wandering through a forest.  Our intrepid mouse meets up with a fox, an owl, and a snake, all of them unsurprisingly wanting to eat said mouse.  Luckily, he's an expert bluffer (and has a set of big brass ones) and convinces each animal in turn that he's about to meet up with a big, scary, (imaginary) friend of his -- the Gruffalo.

He has knobbly knees,
and turned out toes,
and a poisonous wart on the end of his nose.
...
Silly old owl.  Doesn't he know?
There's no such thing as a Gruffalo.

Once the mouse rids himself of his realistic predators, he runs into none other than the Gruffalo himself.  The Gruffalo is of like mind with Fox, Owl, and Snake and thinks the mouse would make for a tasty lunch.  The startled mouse proves even quicker at thinking on his feet than he was previously (he really should give lessons to Sylvester) and not only convinces the Gruffalo not to eat him, but sends the monster fleeing as well as ensuring the others will never bother him again.

Brilliant.

Donaldson and Scheffler have scored another hit in our house (see our The Snail and the Whale review).  Boo is in love.  He loves the rhyme and rhythm.  He loves the sing-song description.  He loves yelling "Guffawo!"  He loves the colourful illustrations.  He loves making me (or Daddy) read it five times in a row.

I'm also really fond.  I'm quite anal retentive when it comes to metre in stories, and I have no complaints here.  The story is clever and fun, though I must admit it does start to get wearisome during the fourth repetition within fifteen minutes.  "Mama read Guffawo adain?" is a popular refrain.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: There are lots of repeating and near-repeating phrases that can encourage vocalization if you pause once your child is familiar with the story.  The description of the various Gruffalo features can be good not only for teaching body parts but also for pointing.  Boo now insists on jabbing delicately indicating both his own and my nose when we get to the poisonous wart part.  He also loves the anticipation of getting a tickle when we get to "purple prickles all over his back".

For older kids, there's plenty to discuss.  Mouse is small and incapable of fighting his bullies/predators physically, at least not with a positive outcome for him.  Instead, Mouse uses his brain and bluffs (okay, he outright lies) his way through all the dangerous situations he finds himself in.  I can foresee excellent (and no doubt confusing) conversations on when lying is wrong and when it might be okay (e.g.  Auntie Mavis does not need to know that in fact her butt does look fat in those pants, and the unknown person at the door should not be told that your parents aren't home, even when true) as well as how sometimes using your brain rather than your fists can get you out of bad situations.  There's also the innuendo in the words of Fox, Owl, and Snake.  None of them say they're going to eat Mouse.  They simply invite him for a meal.  Mouse is worldly enough to know that strangers bearing gifts/invites are not a good thing, a lesson that may be trickier to get across to many on the spectrum, but a very important one to learn.

Bottom Line:
Silly old, M.  Doesn't he know?
There's no such thing as a Gruffalo!


Links:

The Gruffalo on Amazon.ca

The Gruffalo on Amazon.com

Review: Lemons Are Not Red

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Title: Lemons Are Not Red

Author/Illustrator: Laura Vaccaro Seeger
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Year: 2004
ISBN: 978-1596430082
Format: Hardcover, also available in Paperback
Pages: 32
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

I saw Lemons Are Not Red reviewed over at Infant Bibliophile’s site. Since we’ve been trying for weeks to get Boo to solidly understand negation, I figured this would be perfect.

It so was.

The yellow opening page declares:

Lemons are not RED.

There’s a lemon-shaped cut-out which clearly displays a red lemon. But once you turn the page, the lemon cut-out is now over the yellow background, and the red former background is revealed to be a nice big apple.

Lemons are YELLOW.
Apples are RED.

The pattern continues through orange carrots and purple eggplants, pink flamingos and grey elephants, brown reindeer and white snowmen, green grass and the blue sky, and ends with the silver moon and the black night. Good night!

This was an instant hit. Boo loves naming colours, so I knew he’d be intrigued, but I failed to predict the height of toddler awesometude that this would be. Now everything is “not”. Car not pink! Duck not turtle! Which you’d think would be a bad thing, and maybe it soon will be (like when he gets to “Boo not hungry!”, or worse, “Boo not tired!”), but for now I’m pleased. As a nice bonus, he’ll now “read” it to himself, word for word, which is excellent as my threshold for the number of times this is good to read in a row is substantially lower than his.

I’m quite sure Boo has no idea what an eggplant is (because, um, BLECH!), but he knows that they're purple. I’ll have to locate one to show him next time we’re at the grocery store.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: Not too much beyond what neurotypical kids will glean from it. This one suited Boo in that it catered to his colour Special Interest and helped explain the "not" concept we’d been struggling with. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if the issue was due to his communication delay, or because I’d done a crap job of modelling. Either way, problem solved. Boo also find the cut-out and how it changes colour from one side to the other fascinating. I imagine it’d be just as much so for any highly visually-oriented kiddo.

Bottom Line:
This book is not AWFUL
This book is GOOD
Eggplants are AWFUL

Links

Lemons Are Not Red on Amazon.ca

Lemons Are Not Red on Amazon.com

Review: The Cow Loves Cookies

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Title: The Cow Loves Cookies
Author: Karma Wilson (website)
Illustrator: Marcellus Hall (website)
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2010
ISBN: 978-1416942061
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 40
Age Range: Toddler, Preschooler, Early Reader
Kid Love Factor: 5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 4/5

Having adored Bear Snores On, when I saw The Cow Loves Cookies reviewed at The Kiddosphere, I had to request it right away from our library. Once it arrived, we quickly discovered that Karma Wilson has again struck gold, at least in our house.

Whenever Farmer feeds the horse,
he feeds the horsey hay of course.
The horse just loves to nibble hay.
He eats it every single day.
But the cow loves cookies.

The book adds a new animal every ‘verse’ (horse, chickens, geese, pigs, dog), and remunerates the previous ones before repeating that the cow loves cookies. After all the animals and their favoured foods have been mentioned, we learn exactly why the cow loves cookies. You see, she and Farmer have a deal…

It’s told in an AABB(C) rhyming scheme with Karma Wilson’s impeccable sense of rhythm and metre. And Marcellus Hall, better known for his work in The New Yorker, brings the story to life with simple but elegant water colour.

We took this out of the library a week ago. Not only does Boo, with his prodigious recall, have it memorized, but so do I. That’s how often we’ve read it. And I don’t hate it yet, hence the high-scoring Adult Sanity Factor. 

I have a bit of a cookie-loving fiend in my house, (I won't mention any names [Psst: it starts with "B" and ends with "oo"]), but I’m pretty sure this book will appeal even if you’re not so baked treat inclined. Though perhaps you won’t have the problem of your two-year-old suddenly being able to sight-read the C-word in random advertisements…time to whip up some (relatively) healthy homemade ones!

Autism Spectrum Bonus: Much like Bear Snores On, the oft-repeated chorus of “But the cow loves cookies” may draw out verbalizations or at least anticipatory grins if you pause before reading the line. There are plenty of farm animals to imitate as well. For somewhat older kids, you can likely start a discussion on how every animal on the farm has their preferred food and how they’re all different from each other. I’d be careful if you’ve got an overly picky eater, though. Each animal loves one particular food and eats it all the time. You might not want to call that to the attention of any chicken-nugget-and-nothing-else eaters you may or may not have in your household. The interaction between the cow and the farmer is a lovely example of how a friendship can lead to sharing interests and preferences, or how shared interests can lead to friendship. And if you’ve got a pun-loving Aspergian in your house, the final line might make them quack up!

Bottom Line:

Boo just loves his cookie book.

He cracks it open for a look,

about two dozen times a day.

But hey, at least it makes him say:
"The cow loooooves cookies!”

Links
 

The Cow Loves Cookies at Amazon.ca
 

The Cow Loves Cookies at Amazon.com

Review: Dig Dig Digging by Margaret Mayo

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Title: Dig Dig Digging

Author: Margaret Mayo
Illustrator: Alex Ayliffe
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Year: 2006
ISBN: 978-0805079852
Format: Board Book
Pages: 22
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Dig Dig Digging is full of the large vehicles that many toddlers love, complete with rhythmic, onomatopoeic phrasing.

Diggers are good at dig, dig, digging,
scooping up the earth, and lifting and tipping.
They make huge holes with their dig, dig, digging.
They can work all day.

The book goes through 10 different machines, from construction vehicles like diggers and road rollers to emergency vehicles like fire engines to service vehicles like garbage trucks. Each spread of pages describes the machine and what it's good at, then finishes with "They can work all day".

It's cute, it's catchy, it's...kinda irritating. It's also Boo's favourite right now. With lots of action words and sound effects, this book is practically made for expanding toddler vocabularies and imitation. Not to mention their recognition of vehicles. The illustrations are colourful and effective but not very detailed. True vehicle-lovers will likely demand more-photorealistic options, but Boo is thus far content and now very excited to see a garbage truck on the street, something he'd never before been interested in.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: The abundance of verbs is great for expanding language or comprehension, an especially nice bonus if you're struggling to introduce action words to a very concrete thinker. There's also lots of machine-noise words for encouraging imitation. Boo enjoys yelling out "They can work all day!" when I pause for him at the end of each page; it didn't take him long to work out the pattern. The brightly coloured pictures also include the people who are necessary for the machines to run, which might be good to point out to little ones who are normally too intent on fascinating vehicles to notice things as boring as people.

Bottom Line:
Dig Dig Digging is often repeating,
Pages turning, toddler grinning, vrooming and beeping,
Soon we'll be perfect at machine-like creaking,
We'll be reading all day.

Links:

Dig Dig Digging on Amazon.ca

Dig Dig Digging on Amazon.com