I have never met anybody this obsessed with letters. Maybe the author is in the camp that the letter is a dying art and it needs to be revived, etc. etc. A feeling which has clearly been around since before the advent of email given the publication of this book. But it's just a weird book. It's a really weird book.

I guess this could technically teach babies things, but I've also seen toys that are covered with black-and-white patterns, and I think a baby would find that exactly as interesting as this book. So the words are superfluous, and that's not really a book to me.

I'm not sure if there's a real message to it, or if it's just surreal for surrealism's sake. People are just portrayed kind of like forces of nature, and Felix isn't really given any characterization except this weird power. It doesn't go into the source of the power, just the consequences. And there would be really weird consequences to that, wouldn't there?

I think the idea was to make you look at the world in a different way, or something like that, but it kind of falls flat on that since so many of the answers are completely recognizable even when they're upside down.

The book seems like it would function as wish fulfillment for a child listener. When mommy says, "It's time to get out of the tub, we have to go eat," maybe the kid wonders, "Why can't we eat in the tub? If I was the boss, we would eat in the tub. You'd listen to me if I was the king."

It's a meditation on the importance of veterans and the fact that we're upset when people die, but I don't really know who this is for. It seems to be the kind of picture book that you would read to your children-- it's not a chapter book. I guess it's one of those books where I just can't get the message.

Who gets to decide what's beautiful? Because I would imagine that swans find cygnets beautiful. It's just that he's in the wrong company for his beauty to be recognized. Why do humans even think swans are pretty, and why does the ugly duckling give a fig whether humans think he's pretty?

The biggest issue that I have with this book is the first few sentences that spread across the first three pages. "CHICKENS laid the eggs you buy, the eggs you boil or fry or dye! or leave alone so you can see what grew inside naturally." No, that's not how you hatch a chicken.

The page for "A bevy of beauties" is kind of sexist: it depicts a bunch of women and girls from the rear (multicultural, though!) wearing leotards and tights like they're in a ballet class. I'm pretty sure I've heard the word bevy used for quail or something. I've never heard it used for people.

But for the most part, as far as I know, this is pretty accurate. Octopi and cuttlefish actually do change their color in the way that chameleons are thought to do in popular culture, and then all the other fish that she mentions are just naturally constantly camouflaged.