Rating: WARTY!
I've had a lot of success with Scott Gordon books. They're wild and crazy and sometimes fall flat, but for the most part they're very entertaining and offer oodles of positive reinforcement for kids. This one is an alphabet learning book, featuring animals. Sophie the squirrel needs help. You know how it is with those squirrels; they're all nut-jobs. Anyway, she seeks out the Power of Panda.
Sophie has 25 flashcards - one for each letter of the alphabet, and if you read that carefully, you'll know what her problem is, and how Panda can help. One problem I did have with this is that the flashcards are heavily biased towards mammals, as is the case in pretty much every young children's book that features animals. I know that children love cuddly toys and we relate better to our own kind - mammals - than we do to things we see as 'other', but I think it's important, even at that age, to show children that the world is wonderfully, amazingly diverse, and that mammals are not the only (and indeed not even remotely the most populous) class on the planet.
Mammals were fashionably late to the party of life on Earth. It's only in the last 225 million years or so that mammals slowly emerged, and we wouldn't recognize those early ones if we met one, because they were very different in appearance and rather different in physiology to what we see as mammals today. It's only since the dinosaurs went extinct that modern mammals truly began to flourish.
In this case we have to wait until the ninth letter of the alphabet to meet an animal that isn't a mammal, and commendably, it's a very different beast - an inchworm. This is actually the larval form of a moth, so it's a bit of a cheat, but it is an inch long as it inches along! Next we get a jellyfish, but then it's back to mammals again. It's not until 'O' that we get a bird, followed by an insect, and not until 'T' that we get a reptile. We have to wait until 'X' to get a fish and then we're done with non-mammals. Amphibians don't get a look-in! That's pretty sad, and it's the reason, unfortunately, that I'm not going to recommend this one. I want authors to spread their wings, and I think flashcards like this would be immensely more memorable if they had unusual creatures on them rather than contemptibly familiar ones. I really do.
