Toucan Can by Juliette MacIver and Sarah Davis
| Toucan Can by Juliette MacIver and Sarah Davis | |
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| Category: Emerging Readers | |
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Reviewer: Zoe Morris
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| Summary: You can do all Toucan can, but can Toucan do all that you can? A crazy rhyming book every child will love. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 32 | Date: October 2013 |
| Publisher: Gecko Press | |
| ISBN: 978-1877467530 | |
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If you’ve ever wondered what a toucan can do, this book will tell you. The answer, in a nutshell, is EVERYTHING!. Some are typical things – dancing and singing and sliding and swinging. Some are more random – banging a frying pan, doing the cancan. But they all look like a lot of fun, and the question remains: can you do what Toucan can? I bet, I bet, I bet you can!
Told entirely in rhyme, this is a crazy and wild, but ultimately adorable, book that gets faster as it goes along, like a stomping flamenco spinning round and round in a circle, which seems a good analogy given the exotic nature of the book.
While this book is fun (and we mustn’t over look this, because it is Super fun, capital S) it is also a brilliant one for engaging your child as you read to them. You can talk about what Toucan can do, and later what you can do that Toucan can’t. You can talk about families and whether your aunts are like Ewan’s aunts, and whether they too have pet pandas. And you can talk about animals generally because there are so many new ones in this book they might not have come across before – like goose and gander and panther and salamander. It’s a lovely imaginative book in which kangaroos do kung fu (the panda doesn’t – that would be too much of a cliché) and an eclectic mix of animals live (and dance) in harmony.
Even as a child, I appreciated that hardbacks were that little bit more magical than paperbacks, and this edition is no exception. The colours are so vibrant and the animals jump (and swing and dance) right off the page at you. The paper is silky, glossy, feels like a treat to read and the pages are huge and full of detail, though text is limited to a line or two per page to keep it from being too overwhelming. The minutiae are awesome too – the look on Aunty Shanti’s face when she sees Aunty Anne and Aunty Candy dancing without her is delicious and will make little ones cackle.
Simply put, this is a brilliant book I defy any child not to enjoy and I must thank the publishers for supplying it. We also have a review of the autrhors' That's Not a Hippopotamus!
Fans of more typical, farmyard style animals will no doubt enjoy the rhyming fun in Where's Tim's Ted? It's Time for Bed! by Ian Whybrow and Russell Ayto as well. You might also like Scribbles and Ink, the Contest by Ethan Long.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Toucan Can by Juliette MacIver and Sarah Davis at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Toucan Can by Juliette MacIver and Sarah Davis at Amazon.com.
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