Review: Confusing and Not the Usual High Standard You Come to Expect With an A.J. Cosmo Picture Book
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 12 1, 2012
This isn't a great picture book, even as a big fan of the author's other work I can't recommend this one. It starts off well and even a bit humorous, a snake who has no friends, asks a mouse to come back to its den to play with it.  Of course the mouse clearly doesn't want to go to its predator's house and the artwork showing the uncomfortableness and terror the mouse is experiencing is brilliant, but it reluctantly does so probably fearing it will get eaten if it doesn't do as Billy (the snake) wishes. This review does contain spoilers by the way there's no other way of illustrating to you what's wrong with it without doing so. The next page introduces a play station in this den, so you're immediately confused, so these animals aren't following nature's rules and behaviour and this is one of those they are really humans but we can draw animals better and kids might learn a lesson better if these were animals type picture books.  This makes what we just read a bit confusing.  Basically Billy doesn't give the uncomfortable mouse a go at all and the mouse makes the excuse that it is getting late and leaves.  Billy knows the mouse isn't coming back and is depressed, wondering why no one wants to be his friend.  Then we have a few more scenarios with other animals such as rabbit and a blind mole where Billy basically acts like a selfish jerk, doesn't take into consideration the needs of his friend date, leaves them to pick up the bill or does something so the animal that has given him a chance of friendship isn't impressed with him at all.So you're thinking Billy is going to eventually learn the lesson that to make and keep friends you need to do stuff other people want to do, take into account their abilities and if they would have fun doing what you want, mooching off your friends is wrong and the like. Instead an owl just tells him the reason he doesn't have any friends is that he is poisonous.  Being poisonous possibly could explain the initial mouse friendship rejection but the next animals all ignored the whole predator prey thing.  The owl doesn't get its comeuppance in the end, I'm pretty sure Billy didn't learn a thing either so I wonder what the whole point of this was.Formatting wise you also get a few lines of text on a page then the image on the next which doesn't make it a user friendly thing to read on Kindle either.  Other A J Cosmo books are formatted properly.  Other Cosmo books have great storylines too. I don't know what went wrong with this one.