Legs Talk: D E Boone and Marc Burgess

Legs Talk

A hilarious illustrated account of a love/hate relationship. Legs Talk is a whimsical tale starring a witty pair of female legs. Chatty legs are depicted with attitude and swagger. Straight-shooting and in your face, these legs sure can kick. Take this play-ful ride on the bumpy road of romance. You’ll be glad you did.

Remember how I don’t review picture-books here? Well, this is a picture-book.

Legs Talk: A Modern Girl’s Dating Tale should have delighted me: I love quirky, small-format books which take a new angle, as this one definitely does: but when a book has so little text there is no excuse for the clunkiness that is apparent here. The punctuation errors show up even more clearly; and there has to be a strong plot-line, which this book simply doesn’t have.

It is unforgivable for so many of the photos (on which the whole book depends) to be out of focus.

This book is attempting to achieve what the delightful Love, Loss and What I Wore did: only it doesn’t come close, and while it’s attractive at first viewing it fails quite spectacularly to live up to its first impression. Because of its short length I read it to the end, but still cannot recommend it.

The Bomb That Followed Me Home (Rumpleville Chronicles): Cevin Soling and Steve Kille

We’ve all heard of stray cats following kids home or a lost puppy yelping by a kitchen door for food, but did you know that even a wayward little bomb needs love and attention to?

When a bomb, looking for a friend, follows a young boy home, trouble breaks out in a suburban household that is just trying to keep peace with the angry neighbors next door.

I make it quite clear that I don’t review picture books so by sending me a picture book to review, the authors of The Bomb That Followed Me Home: A Fairly Twisted Fairy Tale already have a strike against them.

Because this is a picture book it has relatively little text and I’ll admit, I consequently reached the end before I’d found my fifteen errors: so as I do follow the rules here, I shall now review the book even though it shouldn’t have been submitted to me in the first place.

According to the the press release which was included with this book, the author and illustrator responsible for this book are being deliberately provocative in an attempt to make their readers think about social issues: I wish they’d spent a little more time working on their story, and a little less time thinking about how clever they could be, because it just doesn’t work.

In the book, a bomb follows a little boy home; the next-door neighbour shouts at the boy when he takes a short cut through her garden; and as his parents don’t like the neighbour either, they end up giving the bomb to her. You can guess the ending. And if you want to be helpful you could also try to guess the social commentary contained within the story because all I can see here is a book with an ugly cover and a retro-in-all-the-wrong-ways design; an unengaging text with a few clumsy attempts at humour and characterisation, and a glib, self-congratulatory tone which alienated me right from the start.

Ralphina, the Roly-Poly: Claudia Chandler

Ralphina, the roly-poly is sad because she gets lonely in her garden and wants a friend to play with. But she is so small that nobody seems to notice her. With her mommy’s encouragement, Ralphina digs up a clever solution to her loneliness and in the process learns that she has a lot to offer in friendship. (Did you notice the little play on words there? Get it . . . digs . . . garden? Ha!). Discover how friendship can make your world blossom in all the colors of the rainbow, and also learn stuff that I am willing to venture you don’t know about these adorable little garden dwellers.

I do not want to be sent picture books. I make it clear that I don’t review them, so by sending me Ralphina, the Roly-Poly to review the author already has a strike against her. Nevertheless, here it is in my hands, so I will offer my opinion.

While the press release which accompanied this book states that it was “written to appeal to preschoolers and early readers”, I have not yet found a child in that age-group which finds it attractive, despite taking the book to an infant school and showing it around.

Nothing in this book is quite good enough: there are a few errors in punctuation on the back cover copy and inside this book; the illustrations are fuzzy, and often unattractive; and Ralphina is a particularly unappealing heroine.

The story is predictable and unengaging, and the list of roly-poly-related facts at the end of the book was impossible for either of my sons to read: my eight-year-old, who is dyslexic, was defeated by the fancy fonts which were used while my 13-year-old, who is colour-blind, found that the multicoloured background overwhelmed the words that were printed on it. And it retails at a stonking $24.95, far more than mainstream books of this type: who is going to pay so much for a book of such inferior content?

This is another self-published book to be avoided, I’m afraid.