Looking Down


Talk about your extreme close-ups! 

THREE PROS
*Teaches your child perspective the way few other books can, by starting from a total view of the Earth and slowly zooming in frame-by-frame all the way down to the wings of a ladybug in some family's front yard  
*My son really got into things when I started to play a modified form of hide and seek with the objects on each page (as in, "okay, now where's the school bus?")
*The fabric made to construct the planet is so cheap (it looks like the a combination of wadded up toilet paper and dollar store construction paper), but it somehow translates into a more real kidlit experience

THREE CONS 
*I pretty much just recreated this on Google Maps today, where the locations can actually change each time if you want them to, instead of always landing on the same bug's butt 
*According to the globe in Steve Jenkins' book, the Atlantic coast of Brazil should be roughly a thirty-minute ferry ride from Namibia or South Africa 
*I don't quite get why the afterword limits the location used in the book to a town geographically between MD and SC since it could have been any river community that empties into a nearby body of water

ONE DAD'S OPINION
As you know by now, Donates can vary wildly in their quality.  I actually liked this one a fair amount and so did my son.  I didn't even have a huge problem with the fact that it is wordless, since this allowed me to take it down whatever path I wanted to each time we read it.  Nonetheless, there is no way Looking Down is a Buy, and I'd have a tough time justifying that you need to go out of your way to Borrow it given con #1.  So Donate it is!
    

Buy / Borrow / DONATE / Destroy



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