Easter books for the girls

Have you gathered the goodies for your kids' Easter baskets yet? You've got one week, people. One. Week.

Because I always do, I snagged some books for the girls' Easter baskets. I selected them without the opportunity to flip through them first, so it didn't work out like I'd hoped. Here's hoping the rest of my basket shopping goes a little better.

Night Night Farm

I thought this would be a cute little book for Z--the description said it was full of textures for her to touch while we read the story. We have "Fuzzy Yellow Ducklings," which also has lots to touch and feel, and it's a fun book. So, enter "Night Night, Farm."

The story itself is pretty simple: rhyming text about what the animals on a farm do to get ready for bed. Pigs take a bath, cows sign a lullaby, etc. And each page ends with the sound the animal makes (oink oink, pigs). All that is good, but the textures left me feeling disappointed. Some of the are good--the woolly sheep, the cat fur, the horse's hair, all good. But aside from those, the textures are pretty lame. Several of them are just a portion of the page covered in glitter (the sun, for example). The chicken page has just a glossy red paper for the chicken's comb, and there's really no "texture" to speak of. One page is devoid of any texture at all.

Of course, the texture fail doesn't make the entire book worthless. Actually, I like it a lot better for the animal sounds portion of the story--if the publishers had focused on that instead of the halfhearted attempt at texturizing the pages, it would have gotten an A from me. As it is, I give it a B.

Easter Love Letters From God

This was intended for E's basket (3.5 years old), but she won't be getting it. That's not because the book is bad--it's actually a nice concept and fairly well executed--but because we're Catholic and there are some issues with this book that stem from that.

The story walks kids through the last week of Jesus's life on earth. It tells what happens, includes a bible verse for reference, and then has a little fold-up envelope kids can lift to read a love letter to them from God that expands and applies that portion of the story to their lives. I really like that.

The issues I have with the book are ones you could probably guess pretty easily. First, in the story of the last supper, the text says "This bread is LIKE my body." Nope. Of course, you could just take a black marker and black that one word out, but still. That's not what Jesus said, folks. Second, near the end of the book one of the "love letters" leads kids through a little conversion prayer that is common in nondenominational circles. The wording basically has kids ask God to teach them to love Him better, which is fine. But after that it says something about the child now being part of God's family because of the prayer. And all this is happening on the page of a picture book. There are several things wrong with that, but for now I'll just say we're taking a pass on this one.

P.S. I received these books for review purposes. All thoughts and opinions are my own.