Mi and Museum City by Linda Sarah

Mi and Museum City by Linda Sarah
Buy Mi and Museum City by Linda Sarah at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Emerging Readers
Reviewer: Ruth Ng
Summary: One of those lovely picture books that will work with a wide age-range of readers!
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 32	Date: February 2014
Publisher: Phoenix Yard Books
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1907912283
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Mi lives in Museum City, but he is lonely and bored. Most of the museums there are dull and grey and uninteresting. It is only when he meets Yu one day that he starts to have fun, and he wonders if the mayor will let them open up their own, new, fun museum?

I like this book. It's one of those lovely books that would work well with children of all ages. Older toddlers would enjoy it on a basic level, for the story of Mi and Yu and the museums. Emerging readers would like to try having a go at reading it themselves and looking all the wonderful little pictures, and more confident readers would happily read it alone, and spend ages reading all the text for all the small pictures and figuring out all the many, many different museums there are in the book! It has a flavour of Richard Scarry, I felt, because of how much is packed into each page and how you can just look and look at what's going on. I suppose there's an element of Where's Wally too, since again you're pouring over lots of little pictures.

It's a light-hearted story, with plenty of silliness and made up creatures. Mi is a small, brown creature that I think is probably a hedgehog, or at least that's what he made me think of. Yu, on the other hand, is (I think!) a large polar bear who plays a one-stringed instrument. I love how Mi and Yu end up making up their own funny little songs together. I expect some museum curators would be a little upset at the inference that museums are dull and boring places, but of course there are still some museums that are dull and boring. And fortunately the book redeems itself by later introducing some much more intriguing museums, such as the museum of cats who look like dogs, or the museum of impractical clothing!

The illustrations make the book special. They're simple pencil drawings, with sweet and strange animals and lots of little comments by the animals and labels on the museums to sit and look at for ages and ages! There's a lot of humour in the artwork, and variety from page to page, so although there are lots of pages that are crammed with things to see, others are much simpler. My favourite picture is one where Mi is standing on Yu's nose. They are visiting the moustachioed mayor (a grumpy looking creature who might be a fox!) and Mi is throwing stones down, to show the mayor the fun sounds that they make whilst the mayor is making hmmmhammhmmm noises! There's also, as a special treat, a rather lovely poster of museum city hidden at the back of the book that you could take out and put on your wall.

A lovely book, good for all the family.

If you want to buy yourself another ten minutes of peace then have a look at this book too! Where's Asterix? by Albert Uderzo and Rene Goscinny

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You can read more book reviews or buy Mi and Museum City by Linda Sarah 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 Mi and Museum City by Linda Sarah at Amazon.com.

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