Anne Miranda

The rhyming text is great -- very fun to read aloud. But I do have some hesitations about this book:

1. I'm not sure I understand how the lever freed the shapes from being tangled in the jungle gym. It looks like it somehow destroyed the jungle gym. Is that really a good solution? Especially considering it's referred to as "her" later in the text as though sentient. I will have to share this with some kids to find out if it's confusing to them.

2. As the Kirkus review points out, the female shapes have a bow and/or eyelashes, which is annoying. When my daughter was a toddler she insisted only girls have eyelashes. I was like, where are you getting this? And then I realized it's from cartoons like this. Male characters are neutral. Female characters have something added (usually eyelashes or a bow) to mark them as different. Sigh.

3. Do you really understand what a tetrahedron is from the illustration in this book? I certainly did not and had to look it up. It's a three-dimensional shape rendered as a small triangle inside a bigger triangle. I don't think it works.

4. My public library copy of the book has the book jacket taped on so I can't see the full endpapers. If an illustration is crucial to your book, please don't put it on the part of the endpapers that are covered by the jacket.… (mehr)