For Christmas, my mum usually buys quite a lot of annuals for my sister, and there was a 3 for 2 offer in WH Smith and after not being able to find any other annuals aside from the Moshi Monsters and The Simpsons, she decided to purchase the Beano annual as my sister had watched Dennis The Menice before and liked it. We weren't really sure if she would like the annual as much as the others, but it turned out that she actually quite enjoyed it. It was bought for £4 in an offer,and I think the price will probably have changed by now and depends on whatever store you visit.

Beano has been running since 1951, and this is one of their many released annuals. The front cover features a scene set in the snow, where Dennis is causing mayhem as usual surrounded by famous Beano characters. It's quite eye catching and anyone who knows Beano will instantly recognise the characters from it.

Unlike other more recent annuals that have been made, Beano does not have the same range of puzzles and activities that others do. Instead, this is just an annual filled with comic strips involving the Beano characters. My sister normally likes annuals like this, however even though she'd never read Beano before, she quite enjoys the comic strips of it. Buying this in annual form certainly is cheaper than buying the individual comics to!

There is quite a lot of different comics throughout the annual, involving different Beano characters. Some are quite short, being only a couple of pages long, but there are others which are quite long. I think to enjoy this you would need some basic reading skill as it is quite wordy, although some of the comic strips are more drawing based.

It took my sister a couple of hours spread out over a couple of weeks to actually finish reading the entire of the annual and she seemed to enjoy most of the comic strips that were made. She said that most of them were funny and she wouldn't mind reading them again. So, this annual definitely does have value for money.

The comic strips were well designed as they were clearly laid out and drawn extremely well. Each one was easy to understand and the drawings themselves were detailed well and accurately. Many of them were pretty funny to and had a lot of jokes added in.

I would recommend this annual to anyone looking for a gift for people with a basic reading ability, whether or not they enjoy Beano or not as although my sister had never read Beano, she enjoyed it. The comic strips were well written, funny and detailed enough to keep a childs attention, while giving them an enjoyable read and keeping them occupied for a couple of hours.