What a pretty flower! (In the Night Garden: Ooh, Pretty Flower!)

Member Name: i_am_joy

Product:	In the Night Garden: Ooh, Pretty Flower!
Date:	20/06/09 (61 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Board pages, brightly coloured, nice simple story, photographs from the show used

Disadvantages: ----------

My granddaughter received Ooh, Pretty Flower! for her birthday a couple of weeks ago and I must say it's an absolutely lovely book for her (and Nanny!) to look through, as are the rest of the books in the In The Night Garden series of board books.

Ooh, Pretty Flower! is the book in the series which features Upsy Daisy, my granddaughter's favourite character from the show at the moment, and tells the story of her looking around the garden at all the lovely bright flowers. Igglepiggle decides he is bored of looking at flowers so wants to take a ride on the Ninky Nonk, only to return for Upsy Daisy when he finds the prettiest flower in the garden.

The book itself is a hard cover with board pages, this makes it ideal for the little ones that it is intended for as the book can stand up to so much more than those with paper or card pages. It also means that if sticky fingers or a little spill occurs you can wipe it down quite easily with a baby wipe, this is great news as I cannot understand for the life of me why they make books for toddlers out of paper as they invariably don't last very long. This one is extremely durable though, she hasn't owned it for very long but it's one of those books that you can just tell are going to last for ages - hopefully until she grows out of In The Night Garden, which actually shouldn't be long now as she seems to hanker after Peppa Pig more often than not these days.

I like that the story is very short and told in much the same manner as the narrator (the wonderful Sir Derek Jacobi) speaks on the show, there are just a few words on each page which means it holds my granddaughter's attention much better than those books which have so many words that she is impatient to turn the page before I've even gotten halfway through the text. The words are also large enough for older children who are beginning to read alone; my granddaughter is just two but does know a lot of her letters so I am able to use this book to help her to retain the knowledge and perhaps enhance it by pointing to the letters and letting her tell me what they are. The font used in the book is clear and it's easy for her to differentiate even between letters that look very similar such as 'a' and 'o' - which actually don't look similar when typed like that but not many of us scribble the letter 'a' to the same style as you find on a keyboard!

When looking at the double page in the book you'll see that the text is all on the right hand page, while the left is taken up with a still picture taken from the show relating to that specific part in the story. This is done by way of a photograph instead of a drawing and I think this is great as the bright colourful photographs stand out beautifully against the paler pastel colours of the text pages and borders around the photographs.

This particular story has, in fact, been on television. My granddaughter noticed a re-run of it a few days ago and as soon as she realised what the episode was about she ran over to collect the book from the shelf so she could sit and compare them, she found it highly amusing that the story was on the television and giggle animatedly to herself when the programme got to the few stills that are featured in this book.

As always when it comes to In The Night Garden there are ample opportunities for the adults to make complete buffoons of themselves, most pages have a speech bubble of common phrases from the show - which no toddler will let you do without putting on 'the voices' of the characters. My granddaughter's favourite phrase is 'Oh, Daisy doo', which is great as her voice is so much easier than trying to imitate Makka Pakka - although she gets very annoyed at times that I cannot replicate Daisy's voice perfectly! I think she needs Sir Derek as a Grandpa!

This book is story 2 in the series and cost £3.99 from www.amazon.co.uk which is a reasonable price I think for a book that has already given my granddaughter hours of pleasure, and will undoubtedly give her many more. Mind you, this can work out expensive if you are planning to buy more than one book for the series although Amazon do sometimes have them on one of those offers where if you buy two or three you get a small discount on the total price.

Summary: A lovely book for any In The Night Garden fan.