This was a non-fiction abridged audiobook about the importance of reading aloud to children to engage them in the written word and enrich their lives. That's a sentiment I am fully onboard with, but it felt to me like this was written more for teachers than for parents and there's an awful lot of PhD-Speak in it. I don't believe it's going to reach those parents who would most need it and most benefit from it. I made it to about the halfway point and gave up on it because of this and other issues.
It started out well-enough, but there were so many lists in it - in just the 50% I listened to - that it was hard to keep track and there was no ready 'take-home' message from any of it. The blurb talks about ten principles, but there were scores of them in the lists. I have no idea what the specific ten principles were because everything was so mixed up and repetitive that it just confused things - and in an audiobook, you cannot readily go back and re-read a paragraph or find the particular spot to re-reference something you heard earlier with any facility.
The other problem, especially given that this was an audio-book is that the reader, who was also the writer, did not offer any real examples of what she meant in the text. She would refer to some technique or to something in a book that would make you want to stop and talk about it, or that would make you want to read it in a special way to better engage listeners, and then she would not read an example to illustrate what she meant. This was an abridged version, so maybe the full version offers that. I don't know. All this version offered was a website to visit where presumably, you could hear examples, which is frankly an annoyance, especially since you cannot get to that without logging in, which requires your email address, so no! I am not giving my email address out so it can be handed around so I can get more spam than I already do! And not when that stuff ought to have come with the book.
There was one amusing contradiction in it when, after a chapter bemoaning how children these days never look around them, because they're always looking down at their device, the very next chapter started with a chapter quote about the importance of looking down - which contradicted what the author had said previously! LOL! I am not a fan of chapter lead-in quotes. They're pretentious and meaningless to anyone but the author, and typically they have zip to do with the content of the chapter they precede. Additionally, though the author kept mentioning older students, she seemed like her focus was primarily on very young children, and on fiction - she never mentioned the possibility of applying this technique to non-fiction works. Not in that first 50% anyways.
Though the book claims it's speaking to all parents and guardians of children as well as teachers, to me it felt strongly like it was only speaking to professionals as judged by the educational buzzwords being tossed around, and the academic-level speech and concepts being used. For example, the author frequently referred to an alphabetical scale by which books - and I assume book reading difficulty/ease - are measured. She kept talking about things like "the O, P, Q band" and so on, using one or another triplet of sequential alphabet letters, but nowhere was there any explanation whatsoever as to what that was, what it meant or how to use it!
With my wife's solid support, I've raised two children and put them through school and never once have I encountered this scale. This is what I mean by PhD-speak and why I feel the book is aimed at professionals with little regard for your everyday parent or guardian out there. It would not have hurt to explain what that scale meant, but the author kept on referring to it without evidencing any desire to explain it at all. Maybe in the unabridged version this is explained, but that doesn't help here, and it's a lousy way to treat your reader.
Another issue regarding elitism was that there are authors mentioned here and there as worth paying attention to (without really giving us a reason why or a short example of their work to judge by), but I hadn't heard of a single one of them! I do not count myself as any sort of great authority on children's fiction by any means, but I am very widely-read across all genres and age ranges, yet not one of the names she mentioned was familiar to me at all.
Worse, she mentioned a Newbery award winner, which turned me right off. I have no respect for 'award-winning books' which to me are almost (not quite, but almost) universally trite, pedantic, and tedious to read. There wasn't a single well-known or widely popular author on her reading list apparently, and when she spoke of someone I had never heard of as an "acclaimed" author, I had to wonder momentarily what it was that made that author so acclaimed? Was it just that this author happened to like her? Was it that this author had read her name a few times? Or was there something more? I dunno, but it tried my faith in her examples and her assertions to have things like that put out there unsupported.
The author made a lot of references to the performing arts and there are authentic parallels to be drawn between those, and the act of reading aloud to engage a child's mind, but I'm not a theater-goer and I detest musicals, yet these were the only things the author referenced, as though other such forms: TV, movies, streaming services, YouTube, for example, are beneath her. It felt snobbish and elitist. I suspect most of the people who would truly stand to benefit from this book are not theater-goers either, so this felt, ironically, like it was falling on inattentive ears.
So while I whole-heartedly support the idea of reading to children in your care, even if you do not embrace any of the suggestions this book offers (it's still better than not reading!), personally, I found this book to be of little helpful in any signifcant measure. Instead, to me it felt rushed, confusing, and babbling, which is precisely the opposite of what you need to be if you wish to artfully read aloud to children. Consequently, I can't commend this.
