The story's not too bad, a little didactic, but ok. A guinea pig learns that his fellow pets, a dog, goldfish, and canary, are his best friends, not an imaginary character on tv.But the pictures are just...wrong.
All the animals look like they are in an advanced state of mold, except the goldfish, which looks like it has a serious case of mumps.
Now the dog is believable, I've seen dogs with that coloring, although I didn't think they were particularly attractive, but that's besides the point.
But the canary looks like someone splashed it with paint and then stored it in a cellar to dry and something went....wrong.
And the shape of the goldfish makes one wonder if it's really alive, or actually dead and stuffed...badly.
The guinea pig is the WORST. It looks more like a sloth (mold in the fur, you know?) or maybe really, really dirty. It's a weird shape - guinea pigs don't take well to standing up and waving a sword around - and its eyes are all wrong, as you can see in the picture. Guinea pigs have black, shoebutton eyes.
Let us refresh ourselves with a REAL super guinea pig from the Texas Rustlers Guinea Pig Rescue.
Verdict: The illustrations were so painful. I don't recommend even looking at this book if you can avoid it.
ISBN: 978-0802797056; Published September 2007 by Walker; Borrowed from the library
2 comments:
I see I was totally wrong and you've been faithfully blogging for years! I'm so excited to read all your reviews now. And I saw that one of your papers is on Swedish picture books--Flicka Ricka Dicka and Snipp Snapp Snurr have been my library favorites since I was 6! I'm so looking forward to reading your paper!
Oh, and my point for commenting on this review is that I'm happy to see your negative review of this. I don't know this particular story, but this kind of ugly illustration really doesn't make sense to me. I live in Europe and it seems like almost a majority of picture books in the library have ugly illustration!
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