Balloon Toons My Friend Fred the Plant Review
Balloon Toons
My Friend Fred the Plant
by Daniel Cleary
Reviewed by Emma Wasson
The book is bound very nicely and is slightly different to other books, using a clever decorative spine in different paper to the main book itself. The book itself is hard back and is of good quality for a child’s book. All the pages inside are made from high grade paper and are easy to turn.
The illustrations throughout the book are extremely good with a huge variety of faces being used by the cats to demonstrate their different feelings. Much of the story is also told through illustration only, and I used the pictures to explain the story to my six year old daughter as well, as reading the text. My four year old boy particularly liked the illustrations on the inside front and back covers of the cats and skateboards pulling funny faces. He wanted to keep going back to look at these again and again.
The story is a tale of two cats that eventually develop a friendship with each other and an understanding of another’s point of view. This is done with one cat having a plant as his best friend. On first hearing this news the other cat doesn’t take kindly to this and doesn’t want to be associated with what he believes is strange, however as the story progresses he changes his opinion and forms a friendship with the other cat. Both my children laughed when towards the end of the story the grey cat runs off with the plant to take it to meet his plant Daisy, and both have said that they would like to read the book again for a bedtime story.
The story itself is good, and my children both enjoyed it, however my daughter found the language difficult to understand and got confused several times saying she didn’t understand it even after reading the book several times. The text doesn’t flow particularly well and uses American dialect (e.g., sheesh), which is difficult for little ones to understand. There are also many words with apostrophes (for shortening the text), i.e. aren’t and we’d, we’re and you’re, which is more difficult for a child just learning to read, and my daughter could understand some of them but did struggle with others. Also the book uses capital letters a lot to emphasise words throughout the text and again this is difficult for a new reader as they struggle to switch between lower and upper case. My daughter did start off reading this book herself, however after a few pages insisted that I read it instead as she was finding it difficult. The story itself is different to other books as all the text is in speech bubbles, so it’s different for the children, as they are used to reading either blocks of text or the odd speech bubble.
Overall, I would say that this is a good quality book with an enjoyable tale for children, very well illustrated but perhaps let down a little bit by the narrative.
I would say the book is on a par for value for money with other books available in the UK of this quality.
Rating: 3/5
RRP: £7.99
Available to buy from Amazon here.
We have 2 copies of Balloon Toons: My Friend Fred the Plant to be won (ends 30/06/2013).
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