We’re still absolutely loving interactive board books chez Cup of Tea, so here’s a little round up of some of the newest flappy favourites on our shelves! All of these books were sent to me for review, but that doesn’t affect my opinions.
Where’s Mrs Car? by Ingela P Arrhenius
The latest book in the Felt Flaps series is another winner! These are so simple, but so well-executed, with five large and tactile flaps that babies will love to grab. This one, as you can probably guess, features an array of cute vehicles, and the mirror at the end is a particular favourite. Definitely a series to get your hands on if you need to entertain a little one!
I have just a few books in today’s Kitten Corner round-up, but I think that this is one of my favourite kinds of book – gorgeous, informative picture books with tons of detail for confident readers who need a bit more meat in their stories! All of these books were sent to me for review, but that doesn’t affect my opinions!
I’ve been a huge fan of this fun middle grade series since the first book, The Dragon in the Library (my review is here!), and loved the second book, The Monster in the Lake, too (review for that one here!). So today I’m bringing you a review of book three of Kit’s madcap adventures, The Wizard in the Wood!
This time on Kitten Corner I’m featuring a selection of books that look at a range of emotions, good and bad, through sweet animal stories. If you’d have asked me a couple of months ago, I would have said that was quite a narrow niche to find books in, but it just so happens we’ve read quite a few recently! As always with these posts, any books I received for review will be marked with a *, but the fact they were sent to me doesn’t affect my opinions.
Love by Emma Dodd*
Board book published on 14th January 2021by Nosy Crow
Oh, this is one that will make you cry if it hits you on the right day! This is a sweet, simple rhyming book that describes lots of different things that love is all about, accompanied by beautiful art of two rabbits, a baby and an adult. There are no genders assigned to either rabbit, and no explicit mention of who the adult rabbit is to the child (except in the blurb, where it says “mummy”, but I wouldn’t tend to read that with a child), so this would be a beautiful one to read together no matter what your relationship to your young reading partner is – mum, dad, grandparent, or any other caretaker, this book makes it clear that love is simple and pure and brilliant. It’s a beautiful book in both sentiment and illustration, and one I’ll be buying for many people, I think.
For this instalment of Kitten Corner I wanted to highlight some of the beautiful non-fiction books we’ve been enjoying recently. While I do love a good story, there are some wonderful books out there that look at interesting topics like wildlife and history, and they can be just as gorgeously designed and illustrated, and just as captivating, as fiction!
As always with these posts, books marked with a * were sent to me free of charge by the publisher.
The Castle The King Built by Rebecca Colby, illustrated by Tom Froese*
I accidentally read book two of this fab time travel series first (see my review of A Christmas in Time here!), but that didn’t spoil anything – book one is just as good!
I mentioned in my 2021 goals post that I was stopping star ratings for baby books, as it hardly seems fair given they’re judged on an entirely different metric than books where the story is the focus. But I still want to highlight some of the amazing board books and picture books that are coming out, so I’m introducing a new feature! Kitten Corner will be a less structured round-up of the things I’ve been reading with my little one – I hope you enjoy it. Books in these posts will be marked with a star if they were sent to me for review.
We’re all about the interactive books at the moment! If it has a flap, slider, or textured bit to grab, it’ll be a hit. The very first ones we tried, and a collection we love, is Nosy Crow’s Felt Flaps series by Ingela P Arrhenius – recently we’ve been loving Where’s Mr Narwhal? and Where’s Mrs Tiger?*. The bright colours, simple artwork, and huge soft flaps make these great for babies just starting to be interested in grabbing books. Each of the books has four animals (or people – I’ve previously reviewed Where’s Mrs Queen?*) to find, and a final flap that hides a mirror – you wouldn’t think something so short could provide so many hours of fun!
Books with fuzzy bits are something that have only just come into the spotlight here – I’ve been encouraging my baby to touch the That’s Not My… books for a while, but he’s only started to go for them himself in the last few weeks! One of my favourites is That’s Not My Bat, written by Fiona Watt and illustrated by Rachel Wells, because the bats are just too cute, but we’re also fans of That’s Not My Robot and many of the others. More recently, I received Who Said Cheep?* by Becky Davies and Yi-Hsuan Wu from Little Tiger to review, and it was an instant hit! This book combines feely patches with flaps – each noise-making animal is hidden behind another, wrong, animal with a little bit of texture poking through a cut-out in the flap, and the combination is apparently hilarious. We get giggles whenever we read this one!
Probably my favourite of all the current interactive series at the moment is the new Peekaboo series by Camilla Reid and Ingela P Arrhenius (again! She’s so talented!). We received Peekaboo Apple* and Peekaboo Bear* just before Christmas, and I was wowed by the clever design, simple but effective rhymes, and fantastic construction quality. Some of the sliders are a little bit advanced for an eight-month old who hasn’t quite got the precision of older hands yet, but they’re so much fun to work, even for an adult, and they have a lot of humour in the art, too. Peekaboo Love* just arrived last week, and is already a new favourite, with some brilliantly cute images!
I know not all of you who follow me are parents or are interested in baby books, but I hope this new feature is helpful to some of you! I’d love to know what your favourite books to read with a baby are!
