A story of children learning to celebrate differences.

The cover is colourful and eye-catching, and the main reason I picked this up. The illustrations within are absolutely superb quality for an ebook.

There are no spelling mistakes, the proof-reading is good, the art is excellent, the formatting does not obstruct the story as it does not obscure the text. However the formatting sizes the book to the exact window size and prevents you resizing it, which means that when the title and footer bars come in on the Cloud Reader, they cover the top and bottom of the image.

Sadly the text itself is not up to standard. The book is told in poetry to a four-line verse, normally not rhyming, and on the very first page we have a mistake:
“And should think about it cause a grunt?” ‘Think’, grammatically , should be ‘thinking’.

Similar issues continue throughout the book. This causes actual problems with comprehension when Scott arrives. “He tries to encourage the kids to feel bad” makes him sound like a bully, but the following verse makes it clear he is trying to encourage the kids who feel bad.

I would say this book really needed an structural editor. Some of the terms used would have been caught by a second pair of eyes familiar with the nuances of English.

While accepting people for who they are is a great message, the other part of the message in this book is that accepting who you are means giving up on a desire to change it, which isn’t necessarily healthy. It would have been nice if some of the children had been able to get what they wanted – working together to dye a girl’s hair if she wanted a different colour because it doesn’t matter what people look like she is still herself, for example.

While the book is very pretty to look at with a strong if simple message, the issues with the text means I cannot recommend it. A good edit to smooth the comprehension issues would raise this immediately to a four.