What We Bought: July Edition

One of the funnest parts of picking up a copy of Madame Badobedah was learning how to pronounce her name—once you know how it’s said, it’s really fun to say. (Listening to a reading by the author Sophie Dahl (granddaughter of Roald Dahl) helped us figure it out.) Madame Badobedah is an eccentric character, and the story had us intrigued to the end.

We love Megan Hess’s character Claris (the chicest mouse in Paris), and when we saw she was releasing a new collection called Friends of Claris, we knew we had to get it. Oli and Basil are such charming characters—the dashing frogs of travel—but they make only a passing appearance in the original Claris story, so we enjoyed learning their backstories and definitely plan to continue collecting this series.

We love reading fun picture books with our girl, but we also have to have board books for her to hold while we read to her so she doesn’t tear or wrinkle the pages (one tip of many we recently shared on our blog). This is a sweet adventure of puddle jumping on a rainy day with terrific, simple prose.

We found both of our books from Bookroo’s touch-and-feel topic page. Our little boy loves the ones we have in our library, but we only have a few, so we wanted to grab more. We love the variety of this interactive book—there’s pre-ripped pages, a balled up piece of paper, a kaleidoscopic accordion of paper to explore, flaps to lift, and different textures to explore. While the target age range is for a slightly older toddler than my nine-month-old, it’s super fun and will be great for him to continue to grow into and enjoy.

This board book is full of silicone rubber textures and designs for little fingers to touch and explore. The front cover is the most fun, with the spikes of a porcupine and the elevated, swirly squirrel’s tale, and there are a few other pages that are unique and fun, but the majority of the pages are similar in texture. I would recommend this one more highly, except for the text in the book—a few pages are okay, but generally it feels like the text is there just to be there, with the easiest rhyme someone could come up with. It’s a little bit of a shame, as I think the book would be quite a hit if it had more thoughtful, fun text.