I'm not sure how I absolutely feel about this one. It is very quirky and has Snicket's trademark dry humor and love of interesting vocabulary. The art is well done, colorful and eyecatching. For me, however, the story was too random and mismatched, even for a fictional world meant to be bizarre. As a picture book to be read aloud and shown, however, it works very well.

As a vocabulary lesson, I would recommend it to younger readers, I suppose in the six to nine age range. And if you think your kids are too young or too 'good' (whatever that means) to become acquainted with words like haberdashery and panache, maybe you should examine why and consider the fact that occasionally exposing them to material slightly above their grade level can actually foster mental growth and curiosity about language. But what do I know? I've just been reading since the age of three. Oh, and I'm an English major. #kanyeshrug ( )

Short but very sweet :) ( )

Summary: A dog tries to cheer up his friend, a bird, who is despondent or sad. He gives the bird a task to paint to keep him busy then gets the bird cake and spends a lot of time finding a perfect hat with the perfect panache at the haberdashery to cheery up the bird. He has a mezzo-soprano come to sing to try to cheer up the bird. It's fun and colorful but in the end the bird is still despondent.
Criteria: Critique of Genre- Fantasy- This fantasy book has talking animals, a dog that drives, a baby that owns a hat store, and a goat in a suit. Animals don't do these things but they do in this book. It's a great way to teach new words that are uncommon in language.
Age: all ages- primary, intermediate
Media: paint and brush ( )

27 months - O will give any book a good try and what we got from this book was her sounding out and reading "dog", "hat" and "baby" yay O! She was very pleased as well. No doubt she will be using the words despondent, haberdashery and panache in sentence with correct context within a day or two because she just does that. But this story was bizarre, random and didn't make a ton of sense in the choice of the 13 words or the story connecting them. Back to the library it goes. ( )

Word # 1 is Bird, and the story follows him as he does some strange things with some other strange characters. This book helps broaden your vocabulary and possibly your imagination? ( )