Lumphy asks StingRay if she knows anything about washing machines.
"Not from personal experience," StingRay admits. She is "dry clean only" and has never gotten wet. But she has a lot to say about basements.
I'll just come right out and say it: I love stories about toys being alive. I liked the "Toy Story" movies, and The Doll People series and The Mouse and His Child. I'm also a sucker for books with long subtitles—blame that on Mr. A. A. Milne, I guess.
So, when I saw this book at the library, I thought it would make a fun one to read to my five-year-old. It's a shorter book than the others, only six medium-sized chapters with a couple illustrations per chapter, but it's not necessarily a much lower reading level. Some of the jokes were a little sophisticated for Ridley but she still enjoyed most of the book.
The toys are not as stealthy or secretive as in some of the other stories; they whisper to each other in the presence of the Little Girl and move about freely at night. But it's a bit more whimsical, with rules a little less rigorously defined, and is more about the personality of the toys. Lumphy the buffalo is a little bit like Eeyore, unsure of himself and a little mopey. StingRay wants to appear knowledgeable but is clearly not as smart as she pretends to be. And there's Plastic, who has a chapter devoted to figuring out what exactly a "plastic" is.
It's a cute entry in the living toys genre, and I enjoyed reading it with my daughter. The illustrations are cute, though I do wish there were a few more of them.
Fed to jonathan's brain | July 31, 2009
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