Cay Gibson

I wanted to like and use this book but I found it difficult. The narrative part of the chapters was disorganized and hard to follow, according to my daughter who reads those. I'm the person who skips straight to the book lists, and I found them quite useless. The bare list of titles & authors without any annotation or illustrations left me with no idea of the actual topic of any of the books. For those living outside of major urban areas, 90% of the booklist or more is going to need to be requested through interlibrary loan and without a lot of research, I simply cannot guess which books would be useful and which I would leave at the library desk. Of those books I did recognize, I agreed with some but in at least one case (Tikki Tikki Tembo for "books about China") vehemently disagreed - I am very opposed to the use of this story to represent the culture of China, because the story is not Chinese nor are the names - it's a racist joke basically, far worse than the story of Little Black Sambo which at least represents the protagonist as competent and brave. I'd probably do better finding picture books with a tag search on LibraryThing - at least I'd see images of the covers. This book, sadly, is not a keeper for this family.… (mais)