Customer Reviews

Animal Count

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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.