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| Book Cover via Amazon.com |
Opinion
I want to take a moment to thank Mommy Moo Moo's team of amazing helpers for mailing me a physical copy of her book, which I appreciate beyond belief. The book came in a lovely box, so if you do order from her site specifically, which is where I got mine from. I assure you that the packaging is impressive. The book is a thick board book, perfect for the little ones in your life who haven’t mastered the art of page flipping a more traditional paper-paged book.
Let’s go into some first impressions and to start, this is one very beautiful looking book. The trees are beautifully drawn, the pages are full of rich color, the beautiful pictures are wonderful to look at.
Let’s go into the critiques I have, and they fall in the “Story Structure, Foundation, and Presentation” category. Specifically, there are a few capitalization issues with some of the stanzas, and the other issue I found had to do with the font being either too dark or too light for the drawing they were on. It’s minor, because hey it’s a kid’s book. But it is something and I am noting it just to note it.
The next critique goes into the “Whole Story” part of my scoring. I noticed this specific issue come up frequently with books of this type. “Loblolly, Loblolly, You’re So Tall” is written for its audience which isn’t a critique exactly, but the issue that there is with the storytelling, to me is something I do need to point out. There is no story here; it’s a collection of beautifully written observations with no cohesive tale. Absent is a beginning middle and end of a short story or narrative. I’m sure this story is non-fiction because I don’t see anything made up really in the tale aside from one picture that more of an explanation on the trees look and feel. Does that ruin the book? No, it’s just how the book is. If you have small children, no doubt you’ve encountered many books of this type which are filled with observations but no story.
Now, I want to go into this next part of the review with what I really enjoyed about “Loblolly, Loblolly, You’re so Tall” and that is specifically the beauty of the pictures with words that are calming. I found this book far more soothing to my son than most. He loves it. Here is his review.
“Oooh. There are so many trees! They are so big! Wow,” then he proceeded to point out all the trees in our back yard and told me that none of them were as big as the ones in the book. He enjoyed it, and we’ve been talking about trees off and on all night and into the next morning. Overall to my five-year-old, this is a calming and pretty book, but I am confident this would be great for a two-year-old or three-year-old as well.
Score
Having all of the math and taking into consideration anything I saw, “Loblolly, Loblolly, You’re so Tall” is an 85/100 which is a four-star review on Goodreads and Amazon. This is a lovely book for the kiddo in your life who loves pretty pictures and learning about nature. It’s very calm, and I hope you find it a treasure, I know I have.
