Yes, I still play with toys and absolutely adore a trip down the toy aisle to this day just to see the different action figures on display. I would seem to be the ideal audience for a book about action figures, how they're played with, how they came to be, and ultimately what they mean to their owners. However, I found this book to be a chore to read and extremely repetitive. It needed a stronger hand in tying the varying essays and writers together with a eye towards differentiating topics and keeping a consistent tone throughout. Yes, I'm perfectly aware there is socialized "genderizing" at play between toys for boys and toys for girls. Unless you're going to explain it from a different angle or provide a different take on it, I don't necessarily care to read six essays featuring that as a topic. The essays vary in their ease of readability, with some definitely veering firmly in the direction of someone's thesis paper written entirely by replacing every word with its multi syllabic equivalent. I just feel like this title really missed the mark. It encompasses just a handful of licenses but neglects to truly tackle the evolution of the action figure and they way children play and how they eventually become adults who play or collect in a different way. Some of the essays allude to these points, but since one topic doesn't really flow into the next, what would have been helpful is the author/editor responding after an essay or introducing the next and explaining the background behind it and why it was included in this book, what purpose it serves towards explaining the thesis of the overall book. Great potential on a very interesting topic, but once again the execution fell so far from the mark to render this book forgettable and an extreme disappointment to me.