Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Mop is the nickname of a young surfer dude who has some issues with his fellow kids. Written by Yogis, and illustrated charmingly by Allen, the short book tells in a straight-forward way of how Mop learned to be more mindful of his behavior and his reactions to the behavior of others.
I've said this before many times and I feel compelled to say it again here: I honestly cannot for the life of me understand why any publisher would want to release a picture book in a Kindle version, not even just for review. If there's one thing that Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process does with utter reliability, it's that it totally mangles anything that's not plain vanilla text. This is one of many reasons I refuse to do business with Amazon. The Kindle version of this was mangled. Even on an iPad, the images and text were out of sync, although the images, amazingly, were at least not sliced in half like they had been in an earlier children's book I reviewed, but still, in this case, parts of the text were omitted altogether in Amazon's crappy Kindle app.
Fortunately in both Adobe Digital Editions and in Bluefire Reader, they appeared fine, and with the correct text next to the picture it related to! So I was able to follow Mop to school, watch him play four square (whatever that is! I'd never heard of it!) with his friend and get into an argument during which he pushed his friend into the sand box. One has to wonder where the teacher supervision as during this time! But his anger issues are not improved by his giving vent to them, so during a surfing trip with his mom - which was a nice touch - he learns a valuable live lesson, and he turns his life around before it gets out of control.
I've read a couple of (grown-up) mindfulness books myself recently and so I can understand where this is coming from and get with it. It's a good idea and a useful tool for managing potentially difficult or troubled children, and I commend this as a worthy read.
