I picked this up because I wanted to see how it compared to other similar works we have had in. It didn’t.

This is not a book of five stories. This is an activity book for an adult to go through with a child, with five separate sections: At the Zoo, Counting, Blast-Off, I Feel, and I Like.

There is artwork throughout, but the style was inconsistent enough to throw me, varying from cartoons to photographs, to digital art all in the same section of the ‘story’. More importantly, while the text on the ‘stories’ enlarges, the text on the front matter and the work with parents pages does not. Even at the largest size it is hard to read and required my contrast turned up.

The text is, as you would expect, very basic. I did not find any spelling errors, which is good in an early reader.

The first section, and easily the longest, is a day at the zoo: a list of animals, ordered alphabetically, in the format of their name, followed by a picture. At first the pictures were standard cartoons, but soon the style began to vary to photo-realistic, black and white vector graphics, and I began to suspect clip-art was involved. When I saw the “x-ray fish”, a literal photograph of a fish x-ray, I decided the book was reaching a bit. X-ray tetras are not that difficult to draw!

This is followed by activities: a photograph of the animal with a multiple choice question of which of three animals it is. The answer is on the following page. Then there is a list of all the animals in alphabetical order.

On page 82 we reach the second story: Counting. Again the artwork is inconsistent, from cartoons to photographs of pandas and digital art billiard balls. It s not followed by any activities.

On page 113: we Blast Off, counting down which follows neatly from Counting. Starting with a ten page countdown we get to the story about space. Again the artwork varies from cartoons to photographs, but this has some vocabulary checks and activities after it.

Page 137 How do You Feel, has several repeated captions, including scared, which are repeated in the vocabulary list at the end.

On 162 We get to the I Like ‘story’, which again is a list of things the child likes.

This could be a useful teachers’ or parents’ resource to teach vocabulary but it is let down by variable artwork, erratic formatting, and a misleading description. Anyone who bought this expecting actual children’s stories to read to their children would be disappointed. However as five interactive learning tools, I could see it being of some use, especially if is free.

For people wanting something to work through with their playschool aged or younger children this would be useful. For anyone seeking a story to read to their children, it is not.