View source for Gobble! Gobble! Gobble! by Simon Mayor and Hilary James

{{infobox2
|title=Gobble! Gobble! Gobble!
|author=Simon Mayor and Hilary James
|reviewer=Jo Heffer
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=It's true that most of us look forward with relish to our Christmas dinner, but spare a thought for the poor turkey! The last thing thing it wants to do is to end up on the farmer's plate on Christmas Day! In this comical and colourful book by we meet quite a few turkeys. They don't really do much at all apart from 'Gobble! Gobble! Gobble! and they do that a lot. It doesn't mean they want to be gobbled up as someone's dinner though! This enjoyable book is also accompanied by its own lively sing-along CD.
|rating=3
|buy=No
|borrow=Yes
|pages=32
|publisher=Top That!
|date=April 2011
|isbn=978-1849563178
|website=http://www.hilaryjames.com
|aznuk=1849563179
|aznus=1849563179
|cover=1849563179
}}

In Gobble! Gobble! Gobble! we meet a turkey who lives in a farmyard and is afraid of Christmas dinners; another who gets married to a duck and a third who buys a car that never goes anywhere. The one thing that they all have in common though is that they all like to gobble a lot and there is certainly a great deal of gobbling going on in this book. There isn't a great story but the idea of the turkeys doing all of the things that I have mentioned had my daughter smiling.

The book is written in rhyme and so of course there are many words that rhyme with 'gobble'. Because of this, although the ideas are fun, they do feel slightly contrived. The rhyme is good for young children as they usually love to supply missing rhyming words and it also helps them to join in. The rhyme also helps emerging readers make sensible guesses when they are not sure of a word. The word 'gobble' appears on virtually every page and some pages are given over to this word repeated many times over in big bold letters. This feels slightly excessive at times.

There are some very comical illustrations that accompany the story. Lots of turkeys get up to all sorts of antics, all with quite quizzical looks on their faces. We love the look of the distraught turkey staring mournfully at a Christmas dinner that is missing the meat and also the turkey and the duck in their wedding finery.

There is a CD that goes with the book and when you play it the first thing that you hear is many turkeys making a huge racket until they are silenced by the singer. The song that you hear is actually just the words that you have read in the book set to music which is played on a ukulele. It is a fun song to listen to and also to sing along to which my daughter has started doing with relish. I think this could start to get a little annoying if we play it too often! I definitely think that Gobble! Gobble! Gobble! works better as a song rather than a text to be read. The CD makes it come alive and you are able to ignore the fact that there is very little story.

At the back of the book you can see all of the words set to the music, so if you play an instrument you could actually try playing the tune. If you are not that musical though, it is still possible to join in with more than the singing as there are a couple of pages of pictures showing some quite vigorous turkey actions which you and your child can copy.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

A similar book, written by Simon Mayor and Hilary James is [[I'm A Parrot by Simon Mayor and Hilary James|I'm a Parrot]]. Alternately, if you want another book about noisy animals, you could try [[Hullabaloo! by Gordon Volke and Fenix]].  For more about Christmas, try [[The Turkey That Voted For Christmas by Madeleine Cook and Samara Hardy]], although we had our reservations.

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[[Category:Simon Mayor]]
[[Category:Hilary James]]