I was curious about this book which is the third in a series of picture-only books. I have not read either of the other two, but I suspect these will appeal more to very young children than to anyone older, because to me it made little sense and wasn't really as easy to follow as I'd expected it to be - in the sense of knowing exactly what was going on.
The illustrations were very cute, and I liked the frenetic tone to the images, but there really wasn't a story in the way I'm used to following one. It was more like a middle with no beginning or end. Maybe for little kids this doesn't matter so much, but then I'm forced to ask: if there's essentially no story - or certainly no written story, when why is there an 'author'?!
An illustrator, or artist or however you care to describe Brun, makes sense, but I'm at a lost to see exactly what Beckstrand contributed except in the vaguest of general ideas. And yet he gets first billing over Brun! But that's a pet peeve of mine: I always feel the artist in books - children's books, comic books, whatever, deserves top billing for the work they put in, but the writer always gets that. It just seems wrong to me!
But I digress. I can't commend this as a worthy read not because there is literally nothing to read, but because it was just a shotgun blast of confusion. I've followed and enjoyed word-free books before, so it's not the format or style that turned me off. This one seemed neither a story nor a book, and certainly not a story book.
