Customer Reviews

Max Disaster #1: Alien Eraser to the Rescue

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

 

 

My children and I love Marissa Moss's AMELIA'S NOTEBOOK series and we are thrilled to have these two equally wonderful MAX titles as well. Max is a smart and sensitive character who kids easily relate to and Moss is a magician when it comes to transforming Max's feelings into funny, engaging, colorful art and literature. Max's observations of human nature (and of science!) are keenly insightful, poignantly kid-like and often hilarious, all at once -- no easy feat. Each page of these books contains a world of complexity, and the zany, endearing robots and eraser people Moss/Max invents masterfully reflect and crystallize Max's emotional world. It is refreshing and a joy to come upon books with so much heart and intelligence, and we are grateful to Ms. Moss for creating them! Brava and keep 'em coming.

My 6yo boy picked this up at the library. Looking at the front and back covers and glancing through a few pages, it looks like a cute story about a boy who imagines adventures with aliens and other characters he draws on pencil erasers.

And that's how it starts out. It also starts out with two fun "scientific" experiments, which I did with my two older boys (6 and 3) and they LOVED it. So the third night we were all excited to see what new turns the eraser adventure would take and what tonight's experiment would be.

But that's when the book got weird. Suddenly it became a heavy book about coping with divorcing parents. There was still a thin veneer of eraser adventure, but no more experiments that we could do.

My kids don't need to worry about that. I don't appreciate being trojan horsed into it.

I certainly understand the need for books that help kids cope with divorce, and I might recommend this book for a kid who's parents are divorced or divorcing. But the book's cover should indicate that's it's really about coping with divorce. This book is NOT what its cover indicates it is.


UPDATE:

Most of my reviews get mostly positive reviews, so it's interesting that this one is 0 for 3. Do people come to this book expecting a heavy book about coping with divorcing parents? Nothing on the cover or back hints that it's that kind of book. Certainly a book like that has it's place and is valuable for kids who are going through that ordeal. But it's weird that this book pretends, on its cover and back, to be something else, and so gets read by kids for whom a book like this would lead them to worry about whether their parents were thinking of getting divorced.

For kids who's parents are not divorced or divorcing, and who do not have close friends or relatives who are going through that, this book is a weird and inappropriate choice.