Review: Preachy, Felt Like I Was Reading a Religious Sermon
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 17, 2014
The Gift of Happiness (seems to have been retitled Gift of Christmas since I downloaded it), is a rather preachy read, where a gullible young lion cub, gives away Christmas presents he has bought for himself at the store with his mother's money to other animals along the journey home, as his brother shakes his gobsmacked head, and keeps his sack of purchases for himself.  The forest where they live looked rather lush, it didn't look like the other animals would have had any problems finding food or earning money (if you're substituting animals for humans in our world).  The read just felt preachy, even like a religious sermon about giving away your possessions to others will make you feel better.  It might have had some redeeming value if the animals who took these gifts had given the cub something in return, even if it was meagre, or just a promise to help him learn a skill he can use on his way to adulthood or something in the future. But no the other animals just took, you can imagine them bursting into laughter as soon as he was walked out of ear shot.The book is well formatted like a lot of Michael Yu's other books, lifting its overall rating.  It takes up the entire screen in landscape mode on your Kindle Fire.  The text is on top of the background parts of the image ensuring you never get a few lines on a page and the image they go with on another.  Illustrations are well done and colourful, what you'd expect from this author.  They don't entirely match the text story though, (spoilers) when the smarter brother decides to give half his purchases to give his brother a lift, in the illustrations his brother is sitting on the couch in blissful happiness, likely thinking of the points he's scored for the afterlife or something, the smart brother didn't need to cheer up his gullible sibling. He was already happy from his decision.