Customer Reviews

The Lady with the Alligator Purse

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As an Early Childhood program assistant for 3 to 5 year olds, I can highly recommend this book. The rollicking, repititious lines of the book are mesmerizing for the children as well as the adults. Before going just a few pages, the children are joining in, giving them a real sense of "reading" along. Highly recommended.

My daughter is only 5 months old, but when I read this book to her, we both laughed out loud! I look forward to reading it to her for years to come.

i just bought this book for my three year old daughter yesterday, and i must have read it to her 20 times! she loves it and reads it back to me, she's practically memorized it!! the silly story, catchy rhymes and playful illustrations keep her coming back for more.

This book is a lot of fun. Fun to read and the pictures are a hoot. My 21-month old daughter loves it and so do her parents.

"Nadine Bernard Westcott's irresistable adaptation of the favorite nonsense rhyme is now available in a format perfect for little hands," is the starburst quotation on the back cover of the 1998 version of this board book. In general, the quote is slightly superlative, but 'The Lady with the Alligator Purse' is a cute and safe story.

Although neither the text nor the illustrations are terribly imaginative, 'The Lady with the Alligator Purse' is fun for children to listen to, memorize, and then recite (or sing) as they read about Miss Lucy, her ravenous baby Tiny Tim, the doctor, the nurse, and the lady with the alligator purse. The story literally is the rhyme that little girls recite on the playground during recess as they skip rope, and the pen and watercolor illustrations are nice, but somewhat primitive and rudimentary. Neither of those facts are necessarily bad given the target audience, but there is not really anything unusually special about this story or about this book.

Don't you wish you could solve everything with pizza? The Lady with The Alligator Purse can! Parents may remember this as a song from their childhood, but the book brings laughter and a spark to the imagination for children ages 1-10. Not to mention that they will spend a little quiet time later trying to decide what made the baby think he could eat the bathtub!

I had bought this book as a gift in the past, and other kids have enjoyed it so much, that I bought it for my own new child. It's a fun, quick read with good rhythm.

I did not want to bring the ratings of this book down because we absolutely love it, however the board book edition only deserves two stars in my opinion because of an unfortunate omission. We owned the paperback and it was so loved that it fell apart, so I bought the board book thinking that it would be a sturdier choice. I was very, very disappointed when we received it and found it lacks one of the best pages in the paperback edition. The page has no words on it only a picture so I guess they thought it wasn't necessary, and maybe took it out to make the board book less chunky, but a picture is worth a thousand words and in this case that is definitely true.

The page comes just after the page when lady with the alligator purse announces "Pizza!" and before the page where the doctor and nurse leave. It shows everyone, even the doctor, nurse, cat and dog eating the pizza. It is such a funny page, Tiny Tim has pizza practically flying into his mouth. In my opinion this page provides the perfect transition from the announcement of pizza to time for everyone to leave. Without this page I feel the transition is a little jumpy. I highly recommend the paperback over the board book, which is unfortunate because I like the sturdiness of board books. Everyone in my family loves this book, from my husband, myself, 5 year old, 2 year old, and my 16 month old (although the 16 month old only has the attention span for about half of it).

PS this book is based on a song, if you don't know the tune try looking on you tube and you will find some videos of people singing it.

This is one of my favorite books but once again very disappointed with the Kindle version. Very poor job scanning and optimizing pictures. Any beginner photoshop student could have done a better job.

I bought this for my son because I remembered it from my childhood-love that he can sing along with the story-love that it's a board book-harder to destroy!