Wonderful Wriggly Worm Rides Again by Eugenie Summerfield
| Wonderful Wriggly Worm Rides Again by Eugenie Summerfield | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A second and much bigger selection of the Listen With Mother-featured stories. We are sitting comfortably indeed, reading this collection of creepy crawly-based adventures, and the Bookbag recommends the volume unreservedly. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 144 | Date: February 2008 |
| Publisher: Book Guild Publishing | |
| ISBN: 978-1846241970 | |
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After a premiere collection, with fourteen stories of the life of the wonderful Wriggly Worm, the plump slug, the snooty Lucretia Ladybird and all the rest, comes this larger sequel, with a whole month’s worth of warm, charming and bright stories.
Wriggly Worm is quite an unusual beastie, if the pictures here and in the original volume are to go by – wearing nothing but a vest, perched on the base of his tail, and with arms looking like Twiglets, he is not much like any worm I might have gone grubbing after when a child. Still, he is the most singular worm anyway, and his friends and adventures – the boating trip, the rescue on the ice, the horrors of the rubbish cart – are here to prove that.
The stories are just the same in their approach, but why try and change the winning formula? Sparked from something from everyday life – an election, the post office, the flu – they perfectly use their cast of garden bugs and tell their little five, six or seven page story in a very pleasant way. Never sounding old-fashioned (or is the line about “snail mail” just prescient?) or moralistic, they bring little snippets of the young reader’s life to bear on what is, let’s admit, a rather unlikely hero.
I can’t think of another book that will inspire children to see worms in such a different light. But the emphasis remains on entertainment, and this delivers that most assuredly. If you could ration your child to one story each night, by the end of the volume twenty eight days later they would be most ready to go back to the beginning (or perhaps choosing ‘the one with the firework’ or ‘the one with the evil nasty lawn machine’), and so on and on, I’m sure, until they know them all back to front, and wish for something a bit longer than the snappy little stories here.
I’m not saying that because I think children should be restricted to one book. I do think though that every child should have access to this one book, and I certainly recommend it, even though I’m not a parent, to anyone buying for the 3-7 age bracket.
I would like to thank the author for sending a copy to the Bookbag.
If they enjoy silly characters, they might also like A Children's Treasury of Milligan.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Wonderful Wriggly Worm Rides Again by Eugenie Summerfield 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 Wonderful Wriggly Worm Rides Again by Eugenie Summerfield at Amazon.com.
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