Keith Faulkner

This book features an ingenious fold out 3D viewer with pages shaped to present a different stereoscopic view on each opening. The device, or gimmick, works quite well. A notch for the nose allows even very small children to orient their eyes correctly to see the pictures. {In passing, I should mention that the illustrations, including the 3D views, are not photographs but artwork which appears either painted or heavily Photoshopped.} However, the author's insistence on referring to every show more kind of arthropod as BUGS became somewhat grating after awhile. I am admittedly a geek and a pedant, but although I taught my children to recognize and refer to only Hemiptera as bugs, I can allow for the tendency in casual speech to call all insects bugs and I even refer to pillbugs "but they're crustaceans really, kids" and ladybugs "...beetles". This author, however, refers to bugs on every page. Spiders are bugs. Scorpions are bugs. It becomes unsettling. Not so much reading it oneself, but reading the golly-gee-whiz factoid-heavy text {"no bug scares more people than the spider"} to small children and feeling that one was simply confusing them about the phylum Arthropoda. show less

A cute pop-up book about books. A little boy finds a monster eating books and teaches him to enjoy reading them instead of eating them. The book also introduces various genres in the text; however the language of the book did not flow very well.

Genre: Fiction
Age(s): 5-9

This is an amazing book and extremely entertaining for children. I originally read this story to my daughter and then to my son and purchased this copy to replace the one that my mother had at home so that I could read it for story-time at school and later at the library as a librarian. It never fails to please and the children love to follow along as the hoity-toity pig finally gets his comeuppance. A charming story and a crowd-pleaser.

3.5 stars for this retelling of a traditional tale. The pop ups and illustrations are great, but the story needed just one or two more spreads to establish the pattern. The wide mouthed frog only asks two animals about what they eat before encountering the climactic alligator. Three or four would have been better to allow the reader/listener to "get" what's going on.