Once again I seriously differ from the greater goodreads community.
I think this book is downright awful.
The first reason is that it is based off of the sight word principle. There is a story, told in pictures, but there are only three words in the entire book 'hug' 'bobo' and 'mommy'. 'Hug' is repeated 26 times, 'mommy' is twice and 'bobo' is twice. I think this is utterly pointless. No. That is not strong enough, it is not that I think it is utterly pointless. It is utterly pointless. The sight word principle is false. Those who speak English, the very nature of how we write English down invalidates the sight word principle. We have a phonetic alphabet. Symbols encode sounds. We have to learn each sound and what it codes to be able to put them together into novel combinations or to be able to decode combinations that we have not yet encountered. Take the word 'Jerusalem'. A child who has been taught using the sight word principle cannot read it. They are not capable of extrapolating patterns from one word to another, they will look at the first bit and, if they are religious, recognize that the beginning looks like 'Jesus' and just say 'Jesus' instead of even attempting the rest of the word. And I don't blame them! They haven't been given the tools to try. The sight word principle is bloody ridiculous for English because you have to memorize each individual word based on its shape. It's an ignorant, useless, idiotic way to completely ignore and invalidate every thing that makes the alphabet useful! Even languages that are based on the sight word principle, logographic languages, aren't this stupid. Gah. It boggles my mind. Japanese and Chinese, for instance, are logographic languages, but you don't have to memorize each individual shape, because the shapes are repetitious. Take: 水 which means 'water' it reappears! 氷, add one stroke and you get ice. It gets simplified into its radical form which looks like the left side of this: 泣. Then you know, every symbol that has those three lines is going to have something to do with water. 泣く、泳ぐ、汗、泥、池. 'cry', 'swim', 'sweat', 'mud', 'pond'. It's systematic, and that's what makes it work. The sight word principle in English is NOT systematic, because English is not semantically systematic! It is phonetically systematic! WHY do people insist on this?!?!?! IT makes me want to bang my head against the wall and rescue poor illiterate children from these evil purveyors of pure unadulterated ignorance. How does something that is so utterly divorced from reality come to pervade a society?
Don't teach your children sight reading for English. It does not work. It's a way to completely retard your child's reading skills for life. Teach them phonetics. Unlock the code for them, don't force them to live in darkness unable to access the written word.
So...yeah. I'm a bit passionate about that.
Other ways that this book is dumb: the monkey has an appropriately ethnic name, but then he calls his dam 'mommy'. If you are going to make sure that they character of your 'story', I hesitate to call it such, is correctly named for the culture that you are portraying, would you not also make sure that the character is using a culturally appropriate term by which to refer to a female progenitor? That would make sense to me.
You know, kind of like how when Japanese manga is translated into English they leave the honorifics intact and just spell them out in English, because there is no equivalent in English and you miss all the nuance if you just put Mr. for everything? Best decision TokyoPop ever made. Thank you fan made translations. Power to the people, forcing publishing houses to abandon their stupid ethnocentricities. Ahem.
That is neither here nor there.
The story itself is dumb. If the little monkey wants a hug, why don't the other animals give it a hug? They wander around not giving this poor, lonesome baby monkey a hug, instead just looking at it concernedly, as if there is some taboo against hugging another species...but wait! No! There isn't! Because they all hug each other interspecially at the end! Why didn't they just do that first!?
Story: The pictures had a narrative, the words didn't.
Art: Meh
Price: $11.99