Tag: children’s

Our Little Inventor by Sher Rill Ng

A gorgeous and inspiring picture book about a young girl, Nell, who invents a machine to fix the pollution that is choking the city.

Rating:

I bought this after seeing (I may be wrong but probably not) Stephanie Burgis comment about it. It is a little on the pricey side, but it is good quality so it kinda balances it out.

We start with little Nell who is busy inventing something to help save the city from pollution and she insists she has to go show it to the people there (she lives far form the city).

When she arrives to the city, it isn’t as easy to be considered important. Nell is just a little girl and the adult men have things to discuss (like the pollution). But Nell doesn’t give up and she goes back to the drawing board (inventing) and works hard to help the city.

The artwork/illustrations are gorgeous and full of detail and I like the invention Nell does. And it encourages children to invent and to try to solve real problems.

What I didn’t like was that the ending was kinda left there without much. At the end I felt like there needed to be more, and there is a back pages illustration that hints at it, but story wise it feels a little incomplete.

Still, a cute book witha girl as the heroine and encouraging to invent and create.

Hermelin the Detective Mouse by Mini Grey

Hermelin is a noticer. He is also a finder. The occupants of Offley Street are delighted when their missing items are found, but not so happy to learn that their brilliant detective is a mouse! What will happen to Hermelin? Will his talents go unrewarded?

Rating:

A few years back, when I used to live in Oxford, I went to a museum that had an exhibition about Mini Grey. And Hermelin caught my eye, but somehow I didn’t end up buying it. (I enjoyed the exhibition a lot as it was meant for children and adults and it was about all her books).

But now I have got it and read it! The artwork is still gorgeously cute and I just find this is the type of book you read once and notice certain things in the scenes. And then the next time you read it, you see something different. I love that, because it makes the book be so many stories in one single story.

Each page is packed full of artwork and little clues to what will happen in the story or how, like the scenes tell the story without words. But the words are also there and they are good.

Hermelin is a cute mouse and he keeps trying to help others, but it may have put him in a spot of trouble. Things do end up well (it is a children’s book, they really don’t ever end up badly, except maybe for villains).

The story is cute and the words help tell it, but definitely it shines in the illustrations and I am just on repeat because it was really cute and made me smile and want to read it again as soon as I had finished it.

A good book for children as they can tell their own story from the pictures, or have the story read to them, or read it to someone and keep finding new things that will delight them!