It's pretty faithful to the standard Grimm story, as far as I remember. Not a great story, but not really the opposite of something children should be taught. The pedophile/necrophile prince throws up some red flags, and murder via boogie isn't a common thing lately, but I'm pretty sure nobody is advocating to their children that they "be more like Snow White" so it's more about how the story is viewed today in context.

I think it would have been more interesting had she picked like a specific event of somebody in the lighthouse and went into more detail about the person and the lighthouse itself.

I don't think it'll hurt a kid to read this book, but I don't think it'll help. I can't say much bad about it-- it's just weird.

The story could have used some better editing to fix the meter and rhyme, and it'd be nice if Anika didn't just 'feel silly' but actually recognized how harmful her actions could have been, and apologized. Little things that wouldn't have been that difficult to do, but the author chose not to.

It just seems so weird that you wouldn't tell your kid about Covid. Is the culture that different in the Phillipines, where the book was published? It's written to be applicable to anywhere you have apartments and doctors. Do they not have Kindergarten? Because that's one major reason my six-year-old knows about Covid: he had to stop going to school in person, and start doing Zoom calls.

This book was given to me by the author to review. That is, they asked for this. I can tell the author tried, at least. It's not a bad book. It's not a poor book. It's just kind of there.

It's somewhat charming in its own way, but it takes the one thing I think kids like about the rhyme and strips it out. The writing is pretty good, the meter of the poetry is usually good though it trips up a few times. It's got a good message, although I'm not sure how strongly it conveys it.

Clearly, clearly we need books like this. But I feel almost like I don't have the right to talk about this book. And if I were famous, and I had a large platform, this is the sort of thing where I should turn over my platform to people of color to give their own interpretations of this book. But I'm still a relatively unknown reviewer, and I don't have much of a platform to speak of. So my own opinion is that it's very well-written, and the art is top notch. It seems very powerful to me, an outsider, and I hope it comes across that way to most black people as well. It's a wonderful, beautiful book. And the problem with relating to it is all my own.

Everybody who made this put so much thought into it, and it's a beautiful book. But the 115 page book is enormous, and it shouldn't be marketed as a children's book. It's really a scholarly work.