Books that do more than I expected get high marks from me, and this certainly does more than I expected. I was OK with the format – a page of highly alliterative text, of almost tongue-twister proportions, and the visual on the facing page. But what it took me some time to twig was that there were visual anachronisms in the image, and they feed in to the alliteration too. And then it was a case of me working out how many there were per page – first I thought they all had three, then soon spotted four – I was a long way before the end before the patient platypus came with six elements beginning with 'p' that don't feature in the descriptive sentence. OK, by the time we come to 'r' we're down to 'rain', so they're not all splendidly included, but they are there, and they're great to point out to an adult that you've found them, proving either your experience with your vocab or your hours rehearsing and poring over these pages.

And that's where this wins. The vocab on the alliterative sentence is probably far too much for a young reader, but there are things throughout for her or him to identify and pick up on, and the visuals do just enough to keep good company for a good time until everything's been mentally itemised. And before you know it, you have a young pair of hands very, very used to holding books – and returning to books. And I would never quibble about someone returning to this book in particular, for it's perfectly harmless and educative fun. And as it does more than I assumed, it gets more stars than I may have assumed beforehand – a full five of them.

This book is adorable. I just read it to my little cousin, and we both loved the artwork and she loved pointing out everything in the picture that matched the words to the previous page, it was a little bit like an I spy.
I really loved the descriptive words because when I was reading it, she would ask what does that word mean and we would look it up together.
After reading, I did see that there was a glossary in the back of the book, but we really had fun googling it together and looking at the images that came up with the word.