Review by cmbk -- Puffy and the Formidable Foe

[cmbk]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Puffy and the Formidable Foe" by Marie Lepkowski and Ann Marie Hannon.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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Puffy and the Formidable Foe is a very predictable story of a cat hunting for a rat, but who instead comes across a skunk. I rate this book at two out of four stars. It is not a terribly written story, but it is not particularly interesting. A quiet child interested in stories may be willing and happy to listen to the story or a child that has seen or smelled a skunk may be intrigued, but it is likely not engaging enough to keep a child's attention in general.

The storyline is rather boring and not very engaging. Puffy, the cat, goes chasing after a rat and ends up in the woods and meets a mole before seeing the skunk, which it thinks is a kitty. Then the cat must take a bath. The book is written rather moralistically, but the moral of the story ends up being to not leave home, which seems like a poor moral to be teaching children.

The writing is technically fine, with no glaring grammatical or typing errors. The book rhymes well, but uses complex words and sentence structures to fit the rhyme scheme. Those words and sentence structures may not be appropriate for the age of the children this books seems to written for. It does have a couple pages of supplemental material to help adults tell the story and engage children in the story.

The illustrations are clear, but are clearly not professional. The color scheme is rather muted and uninteresting. They look uninspired and clearly drawn and colored quickly with marker on paper. Because it is illustrated with markers, there is little to no shading, which can make it harder to clearly see and read the images, including the main character, Puffy. One of the supplemental materials is a coloring page at the end, but the illustration appears to have been drawn in color and then copied in grayscale, which makes it less appealing to color.

A young child may gain some mental ability from being exposed to the complex words and grammar and any child may enjoy coloring the coloring page at the end of the book, but that is about the extent of this books good qualities. The illustration style is similar to how many children draw, so it may encourage them artistically. I would not recommend this in general to anyone as there are plenty of books about cats that are more interesting and better illustrated.

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Puffy and the Formidable Foe
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