Toys Go Out: Being the Adventures of a Knowledgeable Stingray, a Toughy Little Buffalo, and Someone Called Plastic - Emily Jenkins, pictures by Paul O. Zelinsky

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 | Comments (0)

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