Trains (Sticker Stories)

Rating:
Summary: Great, realistic illustrations & tons of stickers!
Review: My four year-old son LOVES trains, and this book is fantastic. Tons of realistic stickers that can be placed on various landscapes. He absolutely loves this book. I highly recommend this book and any others in this series. They are an excellent value!

Rating:
Summary: Great, realistic illustrations & tons of stickers!
Review: My four year-old son LOVES trains, and this book is fantastic. Tons of realistic stickers that can be placed on various landscapes. He absolutely loves this book. I highly recommend this book and any others in this series. They are an excellent value!

Rating:
Summary: Good for one time use only -- but still fun for a low price
Review: Sticker Stories Trains

By Edward Miller
This paperback book tells a little story about trains (well, a loose story). There are 75 "reusable" stickers showing cartoon-like trains. There are all different trains, coaches, box cars, diesel engines, subways, steam engines, etc. The text is vague so the child can use their imagination and their own creativity to create their own trains and I think that is great. There are lots of different scenes that the children then paste the train cars onto the rails.

My complaint is that these stickers are not really re-usable. Even when we tried removing a sticker within minutes of putting it on the page it curled up onto itself, got all stuck, and had to be thrown away. Other times when we tried to re-stick it to the paper, it simply would not stick fully and peeled up by itself and made a mess. I really resent the marketing of these so-called reusable stickers (by this company and other publishers) when really they are not reusable. Also my 4 year-old son got very frustrated with them rolling up and getting ruined when he did not cause the problem! He wanted me to "fix it" but I simply could not.

Once the stickers are in place the book can be re-read and browsed as a completed book which is great.

Overall my children have played with this enough to have gotten good use of the 75 stickers for the low price... so I am granting it a 3 star rating. Other books with similar issues charge a much higher price and/or don't allow as much creativity as this book. This would make an excellent project for long car trips or air flights.