How many dinners could you eat in one day? (Six-Dinner Sid - Inga Moore)

Member Name: kingfisher111

Product:	Six-Dinner Sid - Inga Moore
Date:	01/04/07 (1223 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: lovely story and illustrations

Disadvantages: none!

'Six Dinner Sid' is a delightful and humourous picture book, written by Inga Moore, which tells the story of a cat called Sid and how his life is somewhat complicated to say the least...

Sid leaves in a very pretty place called Aristotle Street. He lives at number one. However, unbeknown to his owner at number one, he also lives at number two, and three, four, five and six as well! He manages to live in all six houses with six different owners with no one realising this at all! We are told that the reason that Sid lives in all six houses is so he can have six dinners (evidently one dinner is just not enough!). These dinners vary from fish to lamb to mince to beef and kidney stew so as you can imagine he is quite a well fed cat! In fact, he is so well fed that it is a wonder that he is not incredibly fat, but as you can see from the front cover he is not!

Now there is a downside to getting all these dinners though! Sid has to take on six personalities and have six different names! Depending on which house he is in, he has to be swanky Scaramouche, busy Bob with a job to do, naughty Satan, silly Sally, smoochy Sooty and rough and tough Schwartz! The reason he manages to get away with this is that no one in the street actually talks to each other!

Well, all good things have to come to an end and unfortunately one day Sid gets a cough! Well, you can guess what happens next. He is taken to the vet six times and given six doses of rather disgusting medicine! It is the vet who realises there is something suspicious going on finding it rather impossible to believe that there are six black cats all living next door to each other and all developing a cough at the same time! He contacts all the owners and they are really very cross and tell Sid that from now on he will only have one dinner a day! This is not what Sid wants though so he decides to move out, and instead move in to numbers one to six Pythagoras Place so that he can continue having his six dinners a day! There is one subtle difference about these new homes though - everyone actually talks to each other so nobody minds about Sid's six dinners! At the end of the book we see Sid happily surrounded by his six loving owners!

My daughters and I really love this book. For one thing, it is a very entertaining and humourous story. They particularly like it when Sid has to have all the medicine, and seeing the look on his face as he does! They also like seeing what he does in all the different houses and think it's funny that no one knows about all his secret lives! There is, I think, an underlying message here though, which is that it's much better to actually know and speak to your neighbours. This is particularly evident when we see the contrast at the end of the story - where everyone seems much happier!

The ilustrations in the book are really very good. Sid is always full of expression and there are lovely pictures of him doing all sorts of cat-like things like being scratched and stretching out to sleep. These pictures make you want to reach out and stroke him! It's also interesting to look at the body language of the human characters especially when they are cross. My daughters could immediately tell how they were feeling without me having to read a word!

There is a lot of wonderful language as well, especially alliteration which I think is quite helpful in preparing children to start learning their phonics. there are particularly a lot of words starting with 's' - the names - Sid, Scaramouche, Schwartz, Sally and also the way they behve - swanky, smoochy and silly. These all roll off the tongue smoothly and my three and a half year old is starting to recognise they all have the same sound!

So, overall I really recommend this book - for its lovely story and pictures and also for the beaustiful language! At present the paperback copy is selling through Amazon for £4.79 new. It has 32 pages and is published by Hodder!

Summary: Definitely a good book to share with little ones!