Reading to Willow - The Very Quiet Cricket

What Daddy thinks:
I think my wife bought every Eric Carle book there is. Or just about. I really think that Eric Carle's theory for book writing is to come up with one sentence and repeat it over and over and over, until he reaches the required number of pages to make a children's book. This method doesn't always work.

Luckily it works well in The Very Quiet Cricket. Teach your kid bug names. On each page our hero, the quiet cricket, meets up with a different bug. Watch out for the ending though. There is a big surprise. Sound! Yeah you hear a cricket chirp. My only real complaint is that at the end our cricket meets up with a female cricket and his chirp wins her over. I have to tell Willow not to let herself be taken in by any sweet talking male crickets, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately by the time she's old enough to know what I mean I probably won't have any say on the matter. Oh well, I guess I better keep telling her now to try and get it to sink in.

What Mommy thinks:
One of the reasons I bought this book was because of the real cricket chirping you can hear at the end of the book. Some people complain that Eric Carles' night time books are a bit dark, but what other way is there to portray night time? I can't think of one.

What Willow thinks:
Willow doesn't really show any more interest in the last page, the one with sound, than the other pages, so the gimmick doesn't really work on her. Maybe your child will appreciate it more. She seems to like the rest of the book and I think when she is a bit older, she will love the chirping and think it's the neatest thing ever.M