James Mayrose

In this book, each page shows an image of a pair of animals showing affection to each other. With that image comes a line or two talking about what is happening. Some times you will read a line or two about the "action" in the picture, as if it were part of a story, sometimes you will learn a life-lesson, and other times you will learn a new vocabulary word to use when expressing how you feel. There were several pages that were much better than others and matched their images well, while others seemed as if the text was contrived and thrown in just so that a nice picture could be included in the book. There were also times where large words were used to explain an emotion but were not consistently explained, when definitions were given for one new word, but not for others.

As an educator, I would have preferred a little more consistency in the type of text included with each animal. If you are going to make a book about examples of affection, use only examples of affection. Likewise if you choose to make a book about life-lessons or to teach ways for children to express their emotions with words. There were also a few pages where things seemed a little too contrived or the animals were subjected to a little bit more personification than was necessary, but those things are easily overlooked in a book for very young children. I would suggest this book for anyone sitting with a very young child who likes to look at pictures and hear a sentence or two before wandering off to do something else, or as a tool to talk about how living creatures need and care for each other, but adult readers should be prepared to improvise a little as they read and use this as an interaction tool with the young one they are reading to.

Note: Though this book was a free gift from the author, the content of my review was in no way influenced by the gifting. The book speaks for itself and my review would have been worded just this way even if I'd gone out and bought it. I also give bonus points for Text To Speech enabling on Kindle format.... but that also wasn't a factor in the above review.… (altro)