The Lady with the Alligator Purse
Customer Rating: 
ISBN 0316930741 - The Lady with the Alligator Purse (the book, not the actual lady) seems to suffer from a split personality, in my opinion. Board books are generally made for the 0-3 age group, children who chew on books and bend or tear the pages. The Lady, and the rest of this set, to be accurate, is really for an older group, maybe 3-5. Hand clapping/slapping games are a bit advanced for the tiniest kids and since this rhyme is based on one of those games, it seems to indicate the book isn't for those tiniest kids.
Miss Lucy had a baby... who would've eaten the bathtub if it fit down his throat. Fortunately, it didn't but Miss Lucy still put out the call to the doctor, who called the nurse, who called the lady with the alligator purse. Stop me if you've heard this before. All right, so you've probably heard it before, and a recap is probably not needed.
Westcott's adaptation is fun - and cleaner than the rhyme we used when we were kids - and her illustrations are nice and the lack of the usual vibrant, colorful images that fill most books for the 0-3 age group might be another indicator that the book is aimed at slightly older little readers. Fun, and fun is good, but it's fun that's not even original, so I can't do better than 3 stars for it.
- AnnaLovesBooks
Tiny Tim to Big Tim?
Customer Rating: If it were only up to me, I'd give this book 3 stars. My 14 month old daughter loves this book though, so it gets an extra star for that. I like that this is a fun little song, though a slightly different version than I used to sing on the playground in the '70s. I also like that the cat and dog are on all of the pages (except one) so you can play the "where's the ___?" game.
The thing that really bothers me about this book is that the illustrations seem very disjointed. I can get over rugs, slippers, pictures on the wall, etc., moving around from page to page, but it seems really odd that Tiny Tim transforms from a baby in the earlier pages of the book to a "big boy" with hair on the last 3 pages of the book. Then there is the weird page in between the baby and big boy pictures where the pillows on the bed and Tiny Tim are gone and the bedroom window is suddenly behind the bed. Tiny Tim is also in "big boy" form on the front cover along with the little girl, both of them with red hair instead of blond hair. My 14-month-old is too young to notice or care how disjointed the illustrations are, but it annoys me every time I read this book.
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