Children's Book I Read to the Grandchildren

Comic Book for Kids: Cutie Pie Goes to the Zoo: A Great Children's Comic Book - Ages 4 to 8 by J.R. Finkle
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Cutie Pie Goes to the Zoo by J.R. Finkle is a short children's book for ages 4-8 that is in a comic strip style format. Although the images are in color, there are usually two to a page and they are not big at all. On my Kindle it takes maybe three quarters of the screen for length and maybe half the screen wide and there is no making them bigger/expanding them. Even though they are colored cheerfully and the images are good, (monkeys look like monkeys and kangaroos like kangaroos) they don't hold the attention of my 4 and 6 year old grandchildren like most children's books do. They don't seem as interested in the images as much as all the books I read to them in the past that were not in this comic book style and I am only guessing but I have a feeling that the size does matter to them. The reason I say this is because as I said, the images themselves are quite good, as is the color, so it only leaves the size.

Another thing that may not be appealing to my grandchildren is that the story is told in talk/thought bubbles and the whole story although I found very funny (especially since we have a zoo visit planned in two days) they didn't seem to get why she is so bad. Cutie does things like going into the cages with the animals and instead of my grandchildren laughing or finding any kind of amusement out of her behavior (more accurately, her parents reactions to what she is doing) they thought she was bad and should go to time out.

There are pages you can either print out for your child to color or they can do them on-line and the author gives the link. I tried to get the PDF file so I could print it out but was unable to. When I click the image I do see where Amazon is selling the coloring book so that leads me to believe that this limited-time offer for the free coloring book did end.

The story itself is just for fun, there is no moral to it unless you want to count what Cuties' parents go through and in that case it would be for parents not to take their kids to the zoo or you will need a vacation when you get home since Cutie Pie appears to be an out of control child who sneaks off and does things she shouldn't (although she doesn't seem to understand why). I really didn't feel that this is the kind of story for my young grandchildren since I don't want them to think if they did something like what Cutie does I would find it even one bit funny.

I know the author intended this to just be fun to read but for the above reasons reasons I wouldn't recommend it for young children. Maybe a more exposed 7 and 8 year old would get more enjoyment out of it and understand it more (the way the author intended) but not a 4-6 year old.


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