| Product: |
Monkey Puzzle - Julia Donaldson |
| Date: |
07/04/08 (164 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: lovely story and illustrations
Disadvantages: none!
In our house we are big fans of the lovely picture story books by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, so when my daughter received Monkey Puzzle, as her leaving present from her nursery, it was a very welcome addition to our collection. This writing and illustrating duo produce really fun stories accompanied by the most wonderful illustrations, and this book is no exception.
Monkey Puzzle tells the story of a little monkey who has lost his mummy and a butterfly who helps to find her. One of the things that I like about the book is that the whole story takes the form of a conversation between the two.
On the first page you see a wonderful picture of the little monkey, with a somewhat worried and puzzled look on hios face, saying 'I've lost my mum!' Turn over the page and then the butterfly apears, straight away offering to help find her. As the butterfly does not know what mum looks like though, she has to ask a lot of questions starting with how big is she? The little monkey replies that 'she's big! much bigger than me!' Immediately the butterfly says that she has seen mum and takes monkey to where she is - only to be met by a big elephant! Monkey gets quite upset and explains that that isn't mum, because mum has a tail that coils round trees!
Anyway, the story goes on with the little monkey continually adding little bits of information about his mum - she isn't black and hairy and fat! she's not green and she doesn't croak! - and the butterfly keeping on thinking that he has seen her. However, as he only ever picks up on the last piece of information, he never finds mum, but takes little monkey to see lots of other creatures including a snake, a parrot and a spider. All the time the little monkey is getting more and more exasperated and upset that he has not found his mum, until finally he bursts out:
'Butterfly, butterfly, can't you see?
None of these creatures look like me!'
To which the butterfly replies that she hadn't realised that because of course, none of her babies look like her and she leads the little monkey to a tree full of caterpillars! Anyway, eventually the little monkey finds first his dad and then his mum, and very touchingly on the last page, we see tham all joined in big family hug.Aahhh! We always like a happy ending!
Both my daughters and I really love this book. Firstly, it is a really fun story, based on all the confusions of the butterfly not understanding all that the monkey is saying. It's really funny to see what creature he's going to produce next and my three year old loves joining in with this constant refrain from the little monkey:
'NO, NO, NO!
That's a .....'
and saying whichever creature it is based on the animal she can see. She gets really animated as she joins in with all of these.
My older daughter (who is nearly five and will soon be off to'big' school) loves the fact that the whole story is written in rhyme and very much enjoys supplying the rhyming word at the end of every other line. She is very good at this and it's also developing her early phonic skills.
It's also very clever the way the whole story is written as a conversation and it's easy to tell which of the two characters is speaking as the butterfly's words are all in itallics whereas the little monkey's words are printed normally. It's good fun to put on different voices for the two, and there's plenty of scope for lots of expression.
As always with Julia Donaldson, there are lots of lovely words and descriptions, and also it makes children think about the different attributes of various creatures. When reading it for the first time, you could play a guessing game to encourage children to think about which creature would fit each of the descriptions - my girls know the story too well to do this now though!
Finally, I have to mention Axel Scheffler's excellent illustrations. This little monkey has such an expressive face in all the pictures and all of the other creatures are depicted extremely well too. I think it's all in the drawing of the eyes! All of these creatures are set against very detailed jungle type backgrounds, which makes every page very enjoyable to look at.
Overall this is a great book for young children - the story, the illustrations, the conversation, the language, the rhyme - there is so much to talk about and enjoy and we thoroughly recommend it for young children!
Monkey Puzzle is published by McMillan and our paperback version has a RRP of £5.99.
Summary: A good story to share with youg children
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