Review: A Bit of a Mess.......
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 22, 2013
I have several of Kay de Silva's books in her "Our Amazing World Series".  While I normally enjoy her books, I found myself ambivalent with this one.What I did enjoy about this was it covered many topics and was not just a picture and a name.  With the variety and depth of the topics I feel this would be better for an elementary school child and not a KG or Preschool child.  Each illustration was captioned. It had a clickable Table of Contents.I feel I should mention that I viewed this on a 17" screen using both the Kindle App for PC, the Cloud Viewer and an iPad with the following results:Kindle for PC: the illustrations seem small and cannot be enlarged.Cloud Reader:  When margins are set to the smallest, the illustration fills most of the screen.iPad: While reading the story the illustration fills about 1/4 of the page, however to see more all you need to do is tap the picture and it will enlarge to fill the entire screen.Unfortunately, I had several issues with the writing style.  At times it was too much for a children's book.  An example would have been when writing about the specific dinosaur a bullet system could have been used.  i.e Name, Meaning of Name, Length, Height, Weight, Eating Habits, Special Features, When it Lived, Where It Lived.  The long paragraphs could have been used for the General topics.Which brings me to an issue I have with the chapter labeled "Feeding".  There are five paragraphs that don't seem to really explain the feeding habits of dinosaurs.  The first describes the feeding of sauropods, the 2nd talks about plant eaters teeth and cheek pouches, the third talks about the feeding of theropods and the fourth continues with more information on the theropods.  It is not a coherent chapter on feeding i.e. carnivores, herbivores, omnivores, physical attributes of each.One of the things that irked me the most regarding this book was the mixture of styles of illustrations, some of them were photographs and others were drawings and some were combinations.  Which wouldn't have been so bad except within the drawings/paintings there were many different styles, some were hazy and lacked background detail while others were full of details and had crisp lines.So while I normally recommend the author's books I find I cannot do so for this one. I truly believe it needs a major redo.I do not recommend this book.