Review: Kobee Manatee: A Wild Weather Adventure

Kobee Manatee: A Wild Weather Adventure by Robert Scott Thayer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The synapsis claims that this "thrilling tale follows Kobee Manatee as he travels across the mighty Atlantic Ocean"... Here is where I went into a stupor. Why would a manatee possibly travel across the Atlantic? Good news, it doesn't. Kobee went from Florida to Bahamas, which hardly can be called "across the Atlantic". It's just the synopsis is really bad.

The forte of the book is illustrations. They are marvelous. Colorful, not too basic, not too detailed, just right for a young reader. Another good thing is accuracy: the content doesn't contradict scientific facts, to a point of course. The story itself though is a completely different story. It's not very exciting, not fully developed, intermittent with "Kobee's fun facts" that sometimes are necessary in the plot, and sometimes are not. It's more like a sketch of a story, for a storyteller to rely on, rather than to read. A bit of a rhythm (or better yet, rhyme) would save it I think. As it is it can't be directly read to kid.

In summary, I recomended the book to our local library. Manatees are not a common subject for a children book, and we certainly need more "unusual" subjects. A quick survey among my son's kindergarden classmates showed that not a single one of them know what a manatee is, which is sad. So combining manatees, weather, and ocean true facts in one colorful book goes a long way in terms of education.

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