How Machines Work: Zoo Break! by
DK Publishing
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
I'm torn between 3 and 4 stars, so I guess it makes it 3.5, but I'm rounding down anyway.
The premise of the book is stupid, but very funny; the kind of thing that even small kids know is impossible, which makes that much more fun. So we're following attempts of the Sloth and his friend to break free from a zoo. Each of the attempts is more or less well planned, thought trough in respect of technology, and entertaining.
The text is waaay too detailed for my taste. If a kid needs that much detail, a children's book is not a sourse to look up. And if a kid doesn't want those details, why they are there? The text is boring, over-the-head, going at lenghts about things nobody in our family is interested in. If the idea was to develop that technical part of kid's brain, then it failed. To do that you really need to wrap complicated ideas in simple (but not oversimplified of course) and engaging words. This text? It was like reading a manual. I resorted to telling the story in my own words, ignoring the text. Or was it there to educate the parents, so they can spin a tale knowing what's going on?
The props are ingenious! We spent a lot of time catapulting the heroes over the wall. There is only one problem with them - too easy to break. The book won't survive in a library for very long, which is very sad. It wouldn't survive for long even as a house book. But hey, it's a lot of fun at least.
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