Rating: WORTHY!
This story, part of the 'Fundamentales' written in poetic quatrains by Brian Barlics, and illustrated quaintly by Gregory Burgess Jones
This is scary tale to tell 'e, of Brady Bat, a nervous nellie. It matters not if dark or light, Brady is shut down with fright! What can he do, he has no clue! Then one dark and scary night, young Brady Bat, he sees the light! Renewed now is his constitution, because of Brady's bright solution! There. That's done me in for a week or two!
I really liked this story, although I would have liked it better if Brady had first approached someone else with his fears. I don't think it's a good idea to send any kind of message to a child that she is on her own, and that friends, parents, relatives, guardians, older siblings, teachers, and so on aren't really of any help. The story still could have had these people fail to come up with a remedy, and Brady could have gone on to find his own amusing solution. Here's a spoiler, to clue you in: luciferase, luciferin!
One thing about this that I thought was great fun was that the bats are often shown hanging upside down (of course! what self-respecting bat doesn't enjoy a good diurnal inversion?), so if you read this to your child and have the kids it opposite you, they will see the bats standing up. I don't know why, but for some reason that amuses the heck out of me!
One caveat is that the text is way small. I can't speak for a print version of this, but it was only just legible on an iPad, and completely useless on a phone. I don't recommend asking an older person to read this to your kids unless the have great eyesight or a really good pair of eyeglasses! Why so many writers make their text so small in children's books, I cannot fathom.
On the iPad the pages are less than four inches square, and yes, you can enlarge them, but that's a pain to have to keep dicking around with the page size to read small text and then view the whole image. Part of the problem was that the pages in the iPad were laid out end to end like a film strip rather than as pages, and sometimes they became "sticky" and wouldn't swipe. When I tried enlarging them to fit the screen size, they tended to scoot to one edge of the screen instead of staying centered. I don't know what's up with that. I do know that Amazon has created a really crappy ebook reader with its Kindle app, so I wouldn't blame the author or (for once!) the publisher for this snafu. I can say that if I were going to buy this for some kid, I'd get the print version, not the ebook - except not the one Amazon is asking almost eight hundred dollars for!
Despite these issues, I did like this little book, and I consider it a worthy read.
