eBook Review: Mud Puddle

Title: Mud Puddle

Author: Robert Munsch

Illustrator: Sami Suomalainen

Narrator: Robert Munsch

Publisher: Annick Press

Provider: TumbleBooks

Age: K-3

Robert Munsch is a multi-talented fellow.  He writes funny books that keep both little monsters and little mamas entertained, and then he narrates said books with aplomb.  This book is about a little girl who gets dressed in her nice clean clothes and plays innocently in her backyard.  A  mud puddle jumps on her head numerous times, and excessive bathing and dressing ensue until Jule Ann puts the smack down on the mud puddle with 2 bars of stinky yellow soap.  Munsch's bathtime sound effects are hilarious.  I will use them the next time a mud puddle jumps on Little J and I need to scrub him down. 

I tried the word search game that's included with this TumbleBook, and I was really disappointed.  You are given a sentence from the book and asked to fill in the word, and if the word you type is incorrect it says something like "You're an idiot!  Do you want to try again?" and your answer, of course, is "No, I don't want to try again, I want to cry."  I think Tumblebooks is trying to get on board the interactivity wagon but hasn't quite gotten there yet.

eBook Review: All Aboard the Dinotrain!

Title: All Aboard the Dinotrain

Author: Deb Lund

Illustrator: Howard Fine

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Provider: TumbleBooks

Age: K-3

OMG!  DINOSAURS AND TRAINS!

We don't really need a review for this one, obviously,  because of the following equation:

dinosaurs + trains = awesome

(We'll do a review anyway cuz that's how we roll)

Deb Lund and Howard Fine do a decent enough job of this only slightly awkwardly rhyming romp through a land where dinosaurs ride on top of trains and end up being tossed into a gorge without anyone being hurt.  Herbivores and carnivores co-exist peacefully, one of the brontosaurs has a beehive hairdo,  and "dino" exists as a prefix that can be added to any lexical category.  Kirkus called this book a "hilarious new brouhaha" while PW states that it's "dino-mite."  It translates well into an eBook, too, what with all the "roller coaster dinoride" action.  The animation is a bit choppy at times, but that may have been done purposely to kick things up a notch when the train barrels down a hill and magically flies across a collapsed trestle.  There's a "we think we can!" nod to Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could , but All Aboard the Dinotrain won't be a classic.

An interesting note in Tumblebooks- if you pause the eBook, some of the animation remains- in this case, smoke from the smokestack kept billowing as Little J and I readjusted ourselves on the couch.  We used the Kindle Fire for this one, and it didn't display well.  The Tumblebooks dashboard takes up too much space and I couldn't get rid of the address bar or the tabs in the browser.

eBook Review: Lola in the Library

After our disappointing experience with another library-themed eBook, I thought we should find a GOOD one to share.  I found an old favourite: Anna McQuinn and Rosalind Beardshaw's Lola at the Library.  We used TumbleBooks on our Galaxy Tab again.

I used to use a paper copy of this book with K-3 class visits at the library, and I was interested to see how it would be presented in eBook form.  I was pleasantly surprised with the pacing the narrator used- it was slow and articulate, performed in a style that emulates a child's speaking patterns.  Perfect for the text.

When presenting this book with school children I always skipped the page about Lola and her mom going for cappuccino after visiting the library. It seemed out of place then, but now that I have Little J I totally get it.  We go out for coffee before or after visiting the library, and I give him some foam off my mocha.  Art imitating life!

eBook Review: One Duck Stuck

Phyllis Root and Jane Chapman's One Duck Stuck is another wonderful storytime book, and it transfers very well to the eBook medium.  Repetitive text wears on adult ears after awhile, but Little J chimed in every time a new animal said "We can! We can!"

You know what they say about young children: "repetition is good, repetition is good, repetition is good!"

Cute illustrations, good rhythm and a funny twist at the end make this a sophisticated read for little ones, and caregivers can be happy with the inclusion of numerals and onomatopoeia. The narrator is quite animated and makes good use of her sibilants.

I thought there was too much of a time gap in the narration between the main text and the secondary text; you feel like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop until "Help! Help!" begins.

*****Spoiler Alert*****

Best part of the book?  The "SPLUCK!"

eBook Review: ABC Letters in the Library

I hate that this book is one of the first that new eBook readers may encounter. I'm sure many well-intentioned caregivers will click on the cute image of children in the stacks and see the blurb that begins:

"This lovingly written, playfully illustrated book introduces children to both the alphabet and the library, through wonderfully descriptive, alliterative language."

Oh! It's written with love! It contains library stuff, alphabet stuff and alliterative language stuff!

It's a pile of elephant doody. School Library Journal gave it a passable review, but I think the reviewer was just being nice because it's a book about libraries. My tingling librarian senses are telling me that the quality of eBooks is going to continue to be an issue. Any old ninny/publisher can put their junk up and call it an eBook without the quality control that (sometimes) comes from being part of a huge evil corporation, which truly is the Beauty and the Beast of the thing. There aren't a whole lot of purveyors of fine eBooks for kids yet, so libraries that are trying to keep astride with eBook technology are limited in what they can offer.

Some highlights from Bonnie Farmer and Chum McLeod's ABC Letters in the Library:

"Aisles of authors are arranged alphabetically"

This is only MOSTLY true, except for things arranged by a little something called the Dewey Decimal System. And in series of books that have different authors. And board books, because, why bother? And other pull-out collections that are arranged by genre/format first before author. But those things don’t rhyme. Badly. Like this book does.

"Humming computers collect countless call numbers."

Um.... what? There is an illustration of computers doing karaoke. I have no response to that. 

"The librarians soft shhhhhh soon hushes all talk”

Excuse me? Has the author even BEEN to the children’s section of a public library recently? And who is this super librarian who can ACTUALLY “hush all talk” with a “soft shhhhh?” Anyone who has ever worked with children, or talked to a child, or even talked to someone who has talked to a child knows that ain’t gonna fly.

"Information flows freely in and out of the Internet"

Yes! The information flows freely through the interwebs! In a book about libraries, don't you think it would be better to highlight some other source for authenticated information? Kids KNOW about the internet. Let's talk about Indexes! Interlibrary Loan! Intellectual Freedom!

(Initially I made a crack about how "freely" EBSCO and Gale flow through the internet, but decided against it. Then decided to include it parenthetically. All you collection developers crying over your budgets out there, can I get a AMEN?)

"Teachers tsk at loud teens who grin and then shrug"

Security! Escort that tsking teacher OUT of my library this instant. Loud teens? Come on over to the teen area! We love that you’re here at the library! Is this a good time for you guys to meet here? Shall we start a gaming club? Teen Advisory Board? Knitting group? Want a good book to read now that the Twicraze is coming to a badly needed end? Need to get some community service hours? What about some help studying for the PSAT? Turn that shrug upside down, future tax payer. Welcome to the library. YOUR library.

Inaugural Little eLit

Hooray! This is the inaugural post documenting our experiences with eBooks.  Little J and I sat on the couch, fired up the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and went to our library's website.  

"eBooks!" said Little J.
"eBooks!" said I.  
"Password!" said Scholastic.

Scholastic's BookFlix portal, when accessed from the link from our library's website, has got to be the most boring way to begin an eBook adventure EVER. I assume this is a general log in page for a number of services that Scholastic offers.  

"How dull! You'd think they'd at LEAST add a dancing banana to amuse us while we wait!"  said Little J. (He's two. I might be paraphrasing what he said a little.)

We dutifully typed in our library card number and waited with bated breath, sans banana.  


"We read Boo Hoo Bird?" said Little J hopefully, holding up his paper copy of Jeremy Tankard's awesome book.
"Wait a minute for it to load, baby.  We're going to read an eBook!"  

Two years olds love waiting for websites to load almost as much as they love waiting for Laurie Berkner to buffer on YouTube. We gave up on Bookflix and moved on to Tumblebooks.

The Tumblebooks "library" is organized into six sections: storybooks, read alongs, tumble tv, puzzles & games, language learning and non-fiction books. We were on the prowl for a good yarn, so we clicked "storybooks" and chose a book from the first page: Bonnie Farmer and Chum McLeod's ABC Letters in the Library.

Tumblepad, the software that Tumblebooks uses to display its content, didn't require installation- it just popped up when we chose our eBook (we will try downloading an eBook for use without an internet connection in future posts). I liked the dashboard well enough, but the display area didn't shrink to fit onto our screen. I had to scroll around every now and then to see the text. That seems like a pretty basic requirement: fitting onto the screen. I tried a number of other eBooks and had the same problem. I tried holding the tablet portrait and landscape. No dice.

We got through ABC Letters in the Library, mostly because it was our very FIRST Little eLit eBook and I was trying to be magnanimous about it all.  ABC Letters in the Library contains forced rhymes and outdated views on what a public library is all about. See an extended review this book here.

One redeeming feature was the “zed” at the end of the alphabet.  My Canadianism squeed at that, even if the rest of the book was a flop. Little J reminds me that the elephant at the end of the book was also a redeeming feature.

"He eating his lamp!"

Whatever cooks your noodle, kid.