Animal Count [Board book]

Salina Yoon (Author, Illustrator)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Salina Yoon is the creator of over 70 novelty books including the international bestseller The Icky Sticky Frog. She graduated from the Art Center College of Design and currently lives in San Marcos, CA, with her husband Chris and their two young sons, Max and Mason.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 1 and up
  
• Board book: 12 pages
• Publisher: Little Simon (August 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0689861850
• ISBN-13: 978-0689861857
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 7.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,698,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Salina Yoon is the author/illustrator of over one hundred novelty books for young children, including Little Scholastic: Toys and Rock & Roll: Colours. She lives in San Diego, California with her family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars poorly written, poorly designed, and poorly illustrated, April 25, 2010

By 

Eric Henyey (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Animal Count (Board book)

This book is ostensibly about counting animals on a farm. The only problem is...well, there are quite a few problems with such a short book.

1. The text starts off, "I see one cow...he says moo." "He"? Cows are female (and the illustration does in fact show a cow with an udder.) I don't mean to be pedantic, but really, why would I want to confuse my daughter about male and female? "She" or "it" would have worked just fine for the rhyme.

2. On each page, you are supposed to count the animals and slide a panel to expose one more animal. This works OK for the first page or two, but soon the animals are drawn so closely together that they are difficult to count.

3. The sliders are difficult to move, which means they are not operable by young children. This detracts from the interactive appeal of the book.

4. The sliding panel concept also fails in that it requires you to slide the panel back before turning the page (otherwise, the book won't read properly the next time you open it). It would have been better if it had been designed so that the next page would use the same slider, so that you would automatically push it back as you read the next rhyme.

5. The rhyming pattern is inconsistent. This means that the text doesn't sound right to either adult ears or children's ears.

6. The biggest problem, though, is that the illustrations are simply bad. The animals don't look like real animals, and they aren't posed in real animal poses. The farmhouse is tipped at an odd angle. For some reason, animals are stacked on top of each other. I don't expect photos, or strict realism, but the images should at least have had some connection to what a child sees in real life.

Overall, I get the impression that this book was cranked out without much thought on the part of either the author or the editor.