meh

I'll trim your tree, if you know what I mean. And I don't.

It's a pretty inane and simple lift-the-flap book. I feel children of an age where they would still be interested in lift-the-flap books would also be tearing the books apart. But maybe my kids are more destructive than average children. The story is basically just a vehicle for the lift-the-flap gimmick. There's nothing to it; there's no message; nobody learns anything; nothing happens.

Message

Decorating Christmas trees is fun.

Have yourself a Beary little Christmas.

They have their own Bear Jesus? The world of the Berenstain Bears gets weirder and weirder as time goes on, and as Mike Berenstain builds on the legacy of his parents in a more and more Christian way. Especially given that at least one of the earlier books had a fox creature. Do the fox people have Fox Jesus? Or are they a lesser race that has to settle for the Jesus of another species?

Message

This is the story of Christmas.

Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!

Taking this message literally, it is completely untrue. Taking the message figuratively, I guess it's saying that you need to find your own unique place in life? I'm not even sure. "Don't make fun of people"?

Message

Giraffes can too dance!

Nauseating amount of visual detail. Sickeningly heavy-handed writing.

So this book is pretty, but you can barely go a page without it preaching about how humans are destroying the natural world. I mean, clearly, that's bad. That's why we have things like national parks. But the way that it gets its message across is so didactic that it's skin-crawling.

Message

Humans are evil and are destroying the world.

Ugh, what a preachy book. Gag me!

She's a great artist. I would say she's not that good of a writer. It's the equivalent of drawing diagrams of everything. You don't need to spell it out. When you do that, it becomes uninteresting to read. The person who's reading it feels like you're talking down to them. They feel like you're saying you're better than they are. Nobody wants to read a book like that.

Message

The rain forest is worth preserving.

Found this book a bore and it almost made me snore, down by the sea.

Not to be confused with "Three By The Sea" by Mini Grey, which appears to be significantly more interesting. It kind of meanders and doesn't go anywhere.

Message

Children's stories are badly written.

Child endangerment in the 1870s.

So it's a fictionalized account of a story that somebody told about somebody else. I'm not saying for sure it's inaccurate, but tales do change in the telling and retelling. It's definitely not something somebody would do today.

Message

Children in the 1870s had pretty stark lives. Or, persistence is important.

Poetic primer.

It's just a list of words. It's a rhyming list of words, so maybe that's a little bit entertaining. But there's nothing to it. There's no story. The rhyming is the only thing that could possibly keep your attention in this. It's decent rhyming, and decent meter, so what it's trying to do it does well, but in my opinion it's not trying to do enough, and comes off as disappointing.

Message

None.

In the words of Ponyo, "HAM!"

If you take it from the perspective that a child will likely take it, I'm probably reading too much into it. A child will look at it and think, "Oh, there's a lot of food I don't like, and my parents sometimes resort to ridiculous lengths in order to get me to eat food that I claim to not like, and it sometimes turns out that I like it," so I think they'll identify with that. I guess the important part is that the main character does like it.

Message

Try new foods. Or, if you keep annoying somebody enough, they'll give in to what you're asking for.

Oddly, there are several cities named Kalamazoo and at least 2 in the US named Timbuctoo.

I think I would perform violence on somebody, possibly myself, if I was required to read this on a regular basis, especially out loud. I'm getting real sick of people telling me children learn by repetition. I have ceased to care.

Message

None.