Pink Twadle (Who Do You Love? - Mandy Stanley)

Member Name: MagdaDH

Product:	Who Do You Love? - Mandy Stanley
Date:	29/09/09 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: pretty

Disadvantages: pointless

Mandy Stanley does nice pictures: simple, colourful, in a typical 'modern for children' style; boldly drawn and with a cut out quality that might have originally started with Matisse some 574 generations of illustrations ago. This kind of style appeals to many children and I dare say would appeal to many parents, especially those that dislike super-naturalistic and often very saccharine old fashioned illustrations. There isn't much magic nor much detail to explore, but they are easy on the eye and on the brain too, without being exactly boring.

But this is where my praise of Who Do You Love? has to stop, as, apart from those nice pictures, there isn't really much in this book to recommend it. The text consists of the question 'who does xxx love?' and relevant answers. We get a variety of creatures, mostly animal, with answers ranging from semi-realistic to humorous to totally anthropomorphic; the final question is 'who does owl love?' and the answer is a rather clunky effort at onomatopoeic humour: whoo? you? - but why the owl? why me?

Apart from this, the text is put together without a visible attempt at making it rhythmical or linguistically attractive in any way (I know there is only so much one can do with one sentence captions, but it's certainly possible).

I also have no idea why, if the concept behind the book is to show different kinds of love, is the author using animals in realistic settings? It would make much more sense to have either real human characters or animal fable with animals-as-people. After all, love is a human concept and saying that "fish loves the boy who feeds her" doesn't really further understanding of love or fish or boys.

As you can probably gather, I didn't like Who Do You Love?. It seems like an attempt to extend a series started with What Do You Say? and What Do You Do? while tying in with the approaching Valentine's Day (which is a celebration of romantic and sexual human love and thus doesn't apply to little children, ants or fish); but it's too much of a hotchpotch, with neither relevance nor fantastic imagination.

It is pink and pretty though.

Summary: keep away