I Love You! by Calee M Lee, Tricia Tharp

Rating: WORTHY!

This is another of those novels that shows just how pathetic Amazon's crappy Kindle app truly is. I got the Nook app edition form barnes & Noble, and this is a young children's book which talks about how much a child is loved. It has the advantage of being readable through the text, or listenable, so your child can enjoy this even when you can't read to them right that minute. Tricia Tharp's artwork is simplistic, but elegant, and perfect for young children.

There's a bilingual edition, and it strikes me that it wouldn't be hard to make this multi-lingual, so I have to ask why the voice of choice is female. Don't males love their children? I do! There is, however, a facility whereby you can record your own voice and save it so that you can play it instead of the stock voice included, so whenever your child listens to this, they can listen to it in your voice - or in the child's own voice. I think this is pretty cool. It doesn't replace sitting your kid on your lap or tucking them into bed and reading to them personally, but it will do at a pinch. It played well and was readable on my smart phone, so it's not like you have to rush out and buy a pad for it, either. I recommend this.

Diggy by Calee M Lee

Rating: WARTY!

Diggy is a short and simple young children’s book illustrated simply and competently by Amy Mullen, about a guy controlling a digging machine. It’s all right as far as it goes – it shows the guy getting into his excavator and digging a hole, loading a truck with what he pulls out of the ground, and as soon as the truck leaves, the guy starts digging another hole – but that’s the problem – it doesn’t really go anywhere.

For me the problem with the book is that it misses a golden opportunity for teaching. It never explains why these holes are being dug, and while obviously you don’t want to be getting into blueprints and engineering diagrams, would it have hurt to explain, perhaps, that drainage pipes will be buried here to prevent flooding, for example – and give the kid a bit of a story? To show someone mindlessly digging holes doesn’t strike me as the best use of your child’s time – and it’s a bad example to set. I can’t recommend this book, not when it would have been so easy – and the right thing to do - to have gone the extra mile.

One of the things I fear with the explosion of self-publishing isn’t that we will get a flood of badly written books – we already had that when Big Publishing™ was in charge! No change there! No, the problem is that it’s now so easy, especially in the world of children’s books, to put something quick and easy out there for no other purpose than to make a fast buck without sparing a thought about what you’re delivering to the reader – in this case the young children at the other end. I’m not saying this is what this creative team has done by any means, just that generally speaking, it’s definitely possible for - and it’s also a big temptation to - those whose minds already lean in that direction, to take advantage. I’m glad that Big Publishing™ is no longer in charge, believe me, but now that the flood gates are open, we each of us need to be our own gatekeeper, which is the way it should have been all along.