Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated in nice and colorful detail by Matthew LaFleur (and alternately written by Skeeter Buck according to Goodreads!), this rhyming story for young children was quite entertaining, and I liked it. Note that this was an advance review copy, and there are kinks in it which I hope will be worked out before it goes on sale. For me I was glad to have had a chance to read it.
One problem I often have in trying to read children's books on a phone is that the text is too small to read. Well, don't read them on a phone, you say, but I'm thinking of parents caught with a troublesome child in a waiting room, where the phone might be the only thing to distract them. And to support my case, this book was quite legible on my phone. The problem here was that pretty much every word in every line was run together, making it hard to read because of that. This was significantly irritating! This is one problem with ebooks. When you get a print version, you're getting what the author envisioned. Amazon's Kindle app doesn't necessarily agree with the author and renders its own version for better or for worse!
So take a pad next time, you advise. Well, I looked at this in the Bluefire reader app on my iPad, which is usually a sterling way to read graphic works and there, it was a quite different problem with the text! It was WAY TOO LARGE! It was so large that it was not readable, because aside from literally two or three letters, the entire text was off the page - and it wasn't possible to pinch the page to make it smaller and shrink the text! In short, this ARC version of this book is definitely not ready for prime time as it is! However, I treated this as if it were going to be fixed by publication date and pressed on, and it proved to be a worthy read.
This story might have been written by a dentist - and I mean that in a good way: as in written by someone who cares about your health. Poor dental hygiene can lead to serious ailments well outside the region of your mouth. The toothless fairy knows this, and she doesn't want children to end up like she did - eating too much sugar and ruining her teeth - so she takes action, replacing one child's candy with a musical instrument which is of far more use to the girl. Success! This is what we did with our kids as it happens - trading them cash for candy (while leaving them some, of course!). Lately as they've grown older, we've taken to going to a show or a movie for Halloween, especially one where we can get a square meal as we watch. It's worked out great.
But I digress! I liked the message in this story, and the fact that the fairy wasn't shown to be some impossible paragon of beauty. Quite the opposite in fact. I liked that the story was educational and fun, and very positive. I think it would be a great book to read to your kids in the weeks leading up to Halloween - or at any time when there's likely to be a chance to eat far more sugar than ever is good for a growing body!
