Life is not Black & White
Rating:
5 / 5
This was one of the most interesting books I have ever read. When I first read this book, I did not really get the structure of this book and found myself very confused. I went back and looked at the book again and realized that this book was laid out just like our lives are. In our everyday lives everything is truly not black & white (one way or another), we have alot of gray area. This book has four stories going on at once, kind of like real life. This book would be more for an advanced reader.
The interesting thing is that all of the stories are directly related to one of the stories. It really shows the different sides of a situation. Sometimes we may not see all sides of a story, but this book shows us just how one event can effect many more. I would recommend this book to anyone that really wants a reading challenge. The content is very neat and the illustrations are very good also.
Great for younger, advanced readers
Rating:
5 / 5
This book is a great book for kids to read by themselves. It's a series of seemingly four separate, odd stories (two stories on each page). One story is about a boy on a train, the other about kids and their parents' routine, the third is about passengers waiting for a train, and the fourth is about Holstein cows. They're all very odd stories; the parents come home wearing newspaper, Holstein cows are difficult to see, and there are pieces of newspaper flying in the air like snow.Kids will enjoy this book because each time you read the stories, a different meaning occurs. The writing is creative and arranged imaginatively according to the words. There are some larger vocabulary words that may need to be looked up, such as avalanche, embankment, and udder. Because of the four stories and strange situations, this book would probably be more appropriate for more advanced readers in 2nd and 3rd grade. I even had to read it four times to figure out the stories and how they're related.
Particularly lovely
Rating:
5 / 5
I enjoyed this book. Not knowing what to expect, my husband and I read each of the four stories individually. After finishing one we'd start over and begin with another. Macauley should be lauded for the different modes of art he employs, if nothing else. The watercolor illustrations of a boy on a train differ nicely from the pen and ink drawings of the two kids and their crazy parents. Most enjoyable, perhaps, is the series of train station commuters, waiting for the train and slowly going mad. Kids will enjoy following the escaped criminal (complete with black mask and black & white striped shirt) as he runs from story to story throughout the book. This would not read especially well to a large group of children, seeing as how the pictures are particularly small and difficult to follow from a distance. Also some of these stories lack words altogether. But individual children will enjoy finding new and different details in each of the four tales. Altogether, a fascinating book.
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