Just B

Book blogging is back, baby!                  

THREE PROS

*Illustrator Misty Neyens begets a bevy of basic, bold, and bright blueprints to this letter 'B' board book

*My almost five-year-old gets a kick out of reading Just B: Baby's First Book of Objects to his not-quite-two-year-old sister 

*If luck breaks author Melody Ashling Kloepfer's way, she is virtually guaranteed a 25-book sequel order for her and her printer, Pint Size Productions   

THREE CONS 

*Of course, the downside of the third pro is that dedicating a book to only one letter might not be the type of thing that every parent is looking for from an alphabet book

*I would have swapped the balloon with the banana (and subsequently changed the image on the bib) so that all of the facing pages had two things that went more obviously together 

*Another simple order-related change would be to group the pages to match a typical baby's day (I only had this dawn on me since the author seems to close the final four illustrations of the book with a nighttime routine) -- one example that wouldn't require changing any pictures would be to go from getting dressed to mealtime to toys to animals to bath and then bed 

ONE DAD'S OPINION

Settling on a rating for Kloepfer's book was fairly easy for me.  There is absolutely nothing objectively bad about it, so it has to fall into one of the two 'B' categories I use on this site.  However, I would have a hard time justifying giving it a full Buy given the barrier it faces with highlighting but one letter of the alphabet (which, parenthetically, I must point out is why I chose not to include it in my Alphabet book section). As such, Just B equals just Borrow for me, albeit a pretty good one.                              

Buy / BORROW / Donate / Destroy