Wow! This book is quite the bargain in Thomas book terms. It contains 6 books, which is 4 stories each, and the prices I am seeing is the equivalent of what two of the little paperback volumes would sell for.

The books that are contained within are:

Edwards Exploit
Thomas Gets Tricked
James in a Mess
Trouble for Thomas
A Cow on the Line
Diesel's Devious Deed

And as I indicated each book contains 4 stories for a total of 24 Thomas tales in all. In addition, children will be absolutely delighted with the huge, 2-page picture of Thomas and his coaches, Annie and Claribel, on the inside cover.

Considerations:::
Besides the value and convenience this book provides --convenience being there are lots of stories in one volume-- the major selling point, in my opinion, is that the pictures and the font and the book itself is considerably larger than in the original paperback versions. If I was good at percentages I would calculate a figure to give you about how much bigger the pictures are, but in fact they are big enough that I noticed the difference right away. (Probably an inch on both sides)

The down side to this particular group of books is that they are from RandomHouse's Please Read to Me collection which doesn't have the highest standards when it comes to making stories coherent. If you look around, you will note that it is a frequent complaint of mothers and dads that the stories are choppy, with jumps in the plots.

That said, I think children who are familiar with the television shows won't be bothered by this choppiness at all, simply because they already know the stories.

The other complaint of parents and adult readers everywhere is the nasty tone that some of the stories portray. And lets face it, times have changed to the extent that we shield very young children from name calling and 'just desserts' type of themes. We don't, afterall, want them copying this behavior. My approach was to just change the language I didn't like. But you might have your own methodology; I just think it needs to mentioned.

Finally, the copy that I am reviewing came from the library and is a hardback that was probably bound by Perma-bound so I can't really address the sturdiness issue.

Pam T~
mom and reviewer for BooksForKids-reviews

note: anyone interested in a list of the stories can find them on the website. ( )