Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Illustrated in fine style by Lisa M Griffin, this book aims to teach younger children how to appropriately attract attention when they encounter a problem or need help. Young Isaac is in the second grade, and evidently his parents somehow failed him somewhere along the line, because he can't seem to determine how properly to attract attention when he needs it. Part of his problem is that e has trouble judging how critical a situation is. Naturally, everything is important to him, and when he's struggling at school with a math problem, he just yells out. Later he causes a problem at a store, but at school the next day when there's a real emergency, he tries following the patient procedures he was reminded of the previous day and still gets it wrong!
It's just not Isaac's day, but he learns. Each new situation is examined in Bryan Smith's steady text, and the appropriate course of behavior is highlighted. It turns out there isn't a fixed rule, and you have to make judgments on the fly! This is why it can be so trying for young children. Isaac finally begins to learn these important truths. The book explains simply and patiently and takes the reader through permutations, each of which is designed to teach a little something, adding up to a big something: an improvement in a child's behavior.
I first foolishly tried reading this on my phone where I read most of my books, but it was only available on the Kindle app. Why publishers of children's illustrated books make this insane choice, I do not know. Amazon's crappy ebook conversion process produces not a Kindle book, but Kindling! It mangles anything and everything that isn't plain vanilla text. This is one of many reasons why I personally boycott Amazon. Pictures are often cut up into shreds, but in this case, even on an iPad where there was more screen real estate, the Kindle app screwed-up everything. The pictures appeared with no text in them, and blank speech balloons, and the text was assembled above and below the image. Not all of the text is there. At one point I read, "Make eye contact, raise appropriate - approach." Raise appropriate what? I didn't find out that until I read the book in the Bluefire Reader app on my iPad, where it was rendered perfectly.
I commend this as a worthy read in everything except Kindle format!
