Miss Dirt was both rich and poor! (Happy Families: Miss Dirt the Dustman's Daughter - Allan Ahlberg)

Member Name: sewbizzie

Product:	Happy Families: Miss Dirt the Dustman's Daughter - Allan Ahlberg
Date:	02/12/08 (182 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good fun book, easy to read

Disadvantages: None

Miss Dirt the Dustman's Daughter is a title which is in the Happy Families collection of books. The collection has been designed and written especially for beginner readers to encourage independent reading. The front cover of the book is orange and has a picture of a little girl standing leaning on a dustbin. The title is above this in red lettering. Above the title is the Happy Families logo which is in nice bright coloured rectangles. The back cover is also orange and has small pictures showing other titles available in the collection.

At the beginning of the book we are introduced to Daisy Dirt and find out that she is an unusual girl, she was the poorest and richest girl in the whole town, she had lots to wear and nothing to wear, a huge room or her own and a tiny room of her own. She had a little dog and a big dog, a little hamster and a big horse. She ate a big dinner and a very big dinner. All of this is because Daisy lived half of the time with her mother and the other half of the time with her father.

Her father was a dustman and he was also on the dole and skint. Daisy's mother was a duchess as she had got married again and was now very rich. Daisy's life was a whirl. She spent so much time going between her parents she never knew if she was coming or going. Then one day Daisy went to her Mom's and found, nothing to wear, nothing to eat and no horse. Everywhere had for sale signs. The Duke had had some bad luck and was now stony broke.

Would Daisy be able to show her mom that you can have fun being skint and would she be able to help the Duke get his money back? What would become of her skint dustman father?

This is another fun book and is very enjoyable to read. My eldest who is 6 finds this a very easy to read book and it has been written in nice simple and basic words and there are also nice bright pictures on all of the pages which do help to tell the story.

I have found that the pictures do help to keep my 4 year old interested in the book when I read it to him and he has great fun trying to read me the story from the pictures, this does lead to quite some funny stories!

The text is a nice good size and is in black ink and is always on plain white sections of each page so it is clearly visible and easy to see.

The book is fairly short and only takes me about 5 to 10 minutes to read but it does take my eldest longer so he only reads a few pages at a time as he likes to spend a lot of time looking at the pictures.

As I previously said this book is part of the Happy Families collection and other titles in the collection include:-

Mr Creep the Crook
Mrs Plug the Plumber
Master Money the Millionaire
Ms Cliff the Climber
Mr Tick the Teacher

The book was written by Allan Ahlberg and illustrated by Tony Ross. The book was published by Puffin Books Limited and has a retail priced on the back cover of £3.99. I did not pay this price. I managed to pick up a brand new copy from EBay for £1.50 which is a bargain. This and other titles are available also on Amazon and Amazon Market place with a starting price of 1p.

I definitely recommend this book for all new readers.

Summary: Another great title from the Happy Families collection for children