Review: Story Line Shift, but Still a Good Tale for Toddlers/Preschool
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 14, 2014
I have immensely admired Ahmad Amani's power of analogy both inMath CityandOur Grandparents' Last War, both making the sweeping events of humanity accessible to children and providing a fascinating intercultural perspective to adults.  BIG FISH is his latest offering, aimed to an even younger age set, which I approximate at 2 to 4 years.There is a strange formatting issue for very large screen tablets.  I viewed the book on an older Kindle Keyboard, a 2nd Gen Kindle HD Fire, and a 10.1" Samsung Tab 3 using the Kindle Reading app.  The book looks fine on the smaller, dedicated Kindle devices (especially the Kindle Keyboard), but on the much larger 10.1" screen, the content size did not enlarge enough, leaving a very large amount of empty space around each page.  However, as Amazon had just recently updated the Kindle Reading App, this may be an issue with the eReader itself not auto-compensating page size for larger screens.As for Amani's stylistic approach, BIG FISH does not have quite the poingant subtext as OUR GRANDPARENTS' LAST WAR, but the social analogy is still present,  depicting the lesson that when we force ourselves to fit in, even to the best of our ability, we do nothing but frustrate ourselves. Amani has kept inner theme coherency within his last two works, consistent subtext adding to the evocative power of each story. However, Amani suddenly shifts the theme of BIG FISH to a mystical companionship that leads to an almost creation myth-esque tale of why it rains. Unfortunately, this muddles the overall story context.But, of course, a 2 - 4 year old won't notice such shifts, and the 2nd portion of the story does invoke a sense of fantastical wonderment as well as including the line-art style that I had admired when I first encountered his work.  The rest of the book's imagery didn't quite lend the same immediate connection to the text as GRANDPARENTS' had, but his unique "polished roughness" will be easily accessible to toddler/preschool ages, perhaps encouraging within them the interest to draw and tell their own stories.  And in the end, motivation in telling our individual stories is a great gift indeed.