Bear About Town (A Barefoot Board Book)

Rating:
Summary: Refreshing and Beautiful
Review: Bear About Town is a refreshing book which is well written and beautifully illustrated. The words are simple enough for your toddler to gradually learn by heart. The map of bear's town is the best part, a great starting point for curious questions and conversation. We trace bear's path and figure out how to get to different places in bear's town. The colors are bright and cheerful, and the mood is just right for reading together. My child is almost 3, and this has been a favorite since before age 2.

Rating:
Summary: The worst in the Bear Series
Review: Overall, the Bear series of books are fun, educational and highly enjoyable for my two-year-old son. The quality varies greatly within the series, however, and this one ranks the last on my list. It describes an arbitrary assortment of places and shops, which do not coincide very well with the experience of a typical young child. For example, I have not taken my son to a movie theater and do not plan to do so in the near future. If you are new to the Bear series, you should start with "Bear on a Bike", which, being sophisticated and accessible at the same time, is by far the best.

Rating:
Summary: Fun, imaginative, holds interest for an adult reader
Review: The primary charm of this book is in the illustrations. The text is basic--this is after all a book that is accessible to pre-literate children--but there is enough in the illustrations that an adult reader doesn't have to slog through the same (increasingly dreary) story every time he or she reads it aloud to a child. One can go through pointing out every appearance of the dog, or of the little birds, or of the bees--or whatever.

Children can gradually pick up on different repeated elements or images. For example, on "Friday" the bear goes to the toystore, and for sale there is a bucket that appears on subsequent pages. The text never states that that bucket has been purchased, but that is the inference that can be drawn. The bucket (purple with black spots) is half-hidden in the first picture where it makes an appearance--sly visual details like this encourage children to hunt for objects rather than having it all simplistically laid out for them so they see it the first time through. Older children can enjoy retracing Bear's daily routes on the map of Bear's town that makes up the last page of the book.

As a parent of small children, I can attest that it is quite difficult to find books with the right balance of pictures, text, and substance--it is annoying to snuggle down with your children with a book that is too short, and bookreading simply doesn't work if you try it with a book that doesn't, for whatever reason, hold a child's attention. With its bright colors and amusing images, this book works for the "very young," yet provides enough content to spare an older reader the worst horrors of gruesome repetition.

I'd recommend this book and others in this series (in board book form) as a gift for new parents. It's the kind of story toddlers can "grow into" as they gain language skills.

It may sound a little strong to say so, but I'd describe this book as a minor children's classic.