Land Of Or

It's been quite a while since my last post on this blog.  To be honest, I figured Kid Book Ratings had run its course once my boy started reading like a champ and my daughter expressed minimal interest in books.  But, a flurry of requests from independent authors a few weeks ago rekindled the fire for me.  As a result, I've decided to get the band back together again...our first performance on the world comeback tour is slated for tonight in the Land of Or.           

THREE PROS

*My son absolutely loves what author Katie Mullaly and illustrator Toby Allen put together here and especially gets a kick out of discussing the personified "options"

*I defy you to find a higher quality (in both look and feel) hard-copy children's book 

*The overall message of decision-making is valuable, although as you'll see below, it isn't perfectly executed   

THREE CONS 

*There are times when trying to rhyme too much text ends up distracting the reader to such a degree that the core theme(s) gets lost behind the cadence itself

*By not titling the Yabbut section as a place name (especially since the map actually does do this), it ends up messing up the flow -- in short, we jump from what I initially thought was going to be an illustration-specific character name checklist to a journey across locations full of visually unidentifiable options  

*While neither my son nor I found the characters scary to look at, I could see certain parents shying away from presenting them to their kids 

ONE DAD'S OPINION

Sitting down to review this brings back a flood of memories about how hard it is to boil down other people's hard work into a few bullet points. That said, the rating I decided to give was never in doubt.  Using the book's own methodology against it, I felt like there a few choices that the writing team made that came back to steer them off-course from their ultimate destination: the Land of Buy.                              

Buy / BORROW / Donate / Destroy