The Great Pie Robbery

By Richard Scarry

We loved this book.  I laughed.  The slapstick!  Plus, there's this great scene in the restaurant (that's also featured on the front page) where all the Scarry characters are eating cherry pie at the restaurant, including Bananas Gorilla.  That's my daughter's favourite part.

 This story is a Holmes/Watson style detective story, only Holmes is a bit daft.  Maybe it's a theme that's overdone, but in this case it's done so well, so who cares!

So many sight gags.  So many silly plot twists.  I have so much love for this book.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

By Barbara Shook Hazen
Adapted from the story by Robert L. May
Illustrated by Richard Scarry

My daughter picked this one out at the thrift store.  She insisted on it. She loves Rudolf.

Whatever.  Palatable Christmas fare.  It's pretty long winded, though.  At least it isn't a transcript of that weird Christmas special.  Don't get me wrong; the Christmas special is totally adorable.  But the script is crazy.  Santa and the reindeer are horrible people, and Rudolf should have just hightailed it and never gone back.

 This part is a bit weird, just because it has unnecessary details that don't make much sense.  I bet you Santa only brought the reindeer into the toy factory to break the elf union.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this stuff.  We're pretty anti-Santa for a number of reasons, which I guess could make us seem like a couple of Scrouges.  It can be really crummy for kids to be fed a bunch of lies about Santa and then finally find out the truth.  I feel, especially now that my daughter is old enough to play pretend, that it makes sense to pretend Santa rather than feed it to her as some kind of weird almost-religion.

Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever

 We love Richard Scarry so much.  His books are old, though, and often compiled kind of weirdly.  This is no exception.

"I am a Bunny" is featured in this book, but most of the pages are missing, and there's an extra page with insects on it that isn't in our board book version.

Other stories seem to be complete.  The nursery rhymes are scattered throughout.  The prints are of varying degrees of quality.

You take what you can get, though.

 Not all of the stories are good, but the ones that we like to read are fantastic.  They label instruments, they explain colour theory, there's counting and letters and all kinds of educational fun.

My favourite is the alphabet of things to feed and not feed a hippo.  My daughter is on the edge of understanding comedy. If you ask her whether we should feed the hippo a nest or a nut, she will angrily explain that she already picked out the banana on the first page.

I'm sure she'll get the joke in a year or two.

Cars and Trucks

 This is another Richard Scarry board book.  We have this one and the "Richard Scarry ABC's" which features a lot of the same cars, but has different illustrations and is definitely a different book.

 This book has a great mix of real and imaginary vehicles.  It explains what the vehicles do and organizes them into categories.  It's much better than a lot of the weirdly boy-oriented rough and tumble vehicle books I've seen for babies.

I don't get tired of reading these books.  There's very little text, so we often just look at the pictures and talk about what we see.

This is My House

 By Richard Scarry

This is another board book of diagrams.  This one is about a house full of pigs going about their day.

 There are a lot of bad pigs doing bad things and  some suggestions that good little pigs aren't grumpy and make their beds and don't touch the giant appliances.

There's also a cute little bug to find on every page.  We've gotten a lot of use out of this book.  It had a big hand in expanding my daughter's vocabulary at an early age.

Best Counting Book Ever

 By Richard Scarry

(Apologies for the glare over "best" in the picture)

This really IS the best counting book ever.  So many pages of counting... all the way to 100!

 There's a great story from 1 to 10 about the cat family and the pig-firefighters.  Mama cat catches a watermelon!  My daughter is constantly talking about that part of the book at all times of the day.

 Beyond the story at the beginning, there are so many other cute critters to count organized by colour, clothing, activity, vehicle and more.  The animals are organized in groups of 5 or 10, so that you can count multiples.  Brilliant.

At the beginning and end of the book, there are some common equations that you can check out with your child.

This is a long book with many, many pages of counting.  My daughter will sit and flip through the whole thing with delight, even while angrily insisting that there are no numbers after 20.

Busiest Fire Fighters Ever

 By Richard Scarry

This is a full story with explanations as to how a fire station operates.  In a world where there are public fire alarm boxes.

It's for pre-school and school age children.

We love it.  Mr. Fumble is a main feature, and there's lots of slapstick.

I am a Bunny

 By Richard Scarry

This is a classic.  It's a great size and shape.  The pictures are more detailed than the average Scarry book.  It goes through the seasons and shows changes that happen throughout the year.

 The story is really simple.  It's just a sentence or two describing what the bunny does on each page.  The plants and animals are all existing varieties.  This book is particularly great for babies.