Puss Reboots: Blog: August 2008: Flip and Flop

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Reviews:
Amore by Laura Wolf
Andromeda on the Street of Ducklings by Judi Hendricks
Another Dawn by Sandra Brown
Another Perfect Day by Steven Popkes
Bad Manners by Chris Manby
The Bamboo Confessions by Lauren Weisberger
Bounty by Rand B. Lee
Busy Horsies by John Schindel and Casi Lark
"But Wait! There's More!" by Richard Mueller
Childrun by Marc Laidlaw
Church of the Dog by Kaya McLaren
Click edited by Arthur Levine
Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James
A Day in the Life of my Great Brit Book Tour by Adriana Trigiani
Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs
The Dinosaur Train by James L. Cambrias
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
El Tigre by John H. Manhold
Five by Julianna Baggott
Flip and Flop by Dawn Apperley
The Fourth Watcher by Timothy Hallnan
The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
A Grave Mistake by Stella Cameron
The Great Waldo Search by Martin Handfold
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
I Know a Woman by Quinn Dalton
Leaving a Light On by Claire LaZebnik
Lifetime Loser by James Ross
Moving Day by Cindy Chupack
An Open Letter to Earth by Scott Dalrymple
Persistence of Memory by J. M. Snyder
Poison Victory by Albert E. Cowdrey
The Political Prisoner by Charles Coleman Finlay
Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Regent's Knight by J. M. Snyder
Shades of Darkness, Shades of Grace
Simplexity by Jeffrey Kluger
Smoky the Baby Goat by Mary Elting Folsom and Veronica Reed
There's a Cow in the Cabbage Patch by Clare Beaton and Stella Blackstone
The Truth About Nigel by Jennifer Weiner
The Two-Month Itch by Sarah Mlynowski
Voodoo Dolls, C-Cups and Eminem by Melissa Senate
Yoga Babe by Lauren Henderson

Previous month

Flip and Flop: 08/08/08

Flip and Flop by Dawn Apperley tells the story of sibling penguins who are tired of playing with each other and the new friends they each make. The basic theme of learning the balance between family time and personal time is a good one but the book could have better.

The problem lies with who the new friends are: a pair of polar bear cubs. The few times I've read this book with my children, they both complain (rightly so) that polar bears live in the north and penguins live in the south. I know it's a work of fiction and Apperley isn't the only one to mix the two species together (Coca Cola) but there's no reason why the other friends couldn't have also been penguins. They could have been a different species or different colors.

If you can get past the polar bears, the story itself is a fun tongue twister with similar difficulty as Fox in Socks or Hop on Pop (both by Dr. Seuss). It gets harder with the introduction of the two bears: Hip and Hop. I just wish they weren't bears.