Review: A Short Story About Adoption, With the Odd Illustration/Photograph Spliced Between the Paragraphs
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 27, 2012
I originally thought this was going to be a picture book, it does have a couple of pictures but not on each page, it's basically a short story with as you would do if you created a flier in word, small pictures and photographs spliced in between paragraphs every once in a while.  So reading it to a child who likes to look at the pictures as you read, well they may be slightly disappointed.  I think this actually would have worked better as a picture book but perhaps the author doesn't know any illustrators to team up with. If this was ever published as a physical book I'd imagine publishers would do it as a picture book.  Basically this short story is set in an orphanage, obviously to make it less scary or palatable for children, the main character is simply an elephant rather than a human child with a disability.  The elephant suffers from allergies (of what is never divulged) that make it spray snot over those who come to adopt it (again this is where an illustrator would have made this a really cool picture book).  The elephant has turned off the initial desire of many adoptive parents by sneezing over them, its friends have all been adopted and it has become very depressed not wanting to even meet prospective adoptees. Mrs Downey and employee at the orphanage wonders what can be done to overcome this problem.It's an all right story, maybe a little scary in its simplicity that people including old men can walk in off the street and just take a kid home but filling in paperwork and background checks before coming into contact with children isn't going to be that interesting for a kid to read after all.