Heidi Fiedler's "grammar guide" actually encompasses parts of speech, grammatical rules, and literary devices, accompanying each brightly-colored rule page with a whimsical illustration. I absolutely adored the format of this book! I appreciated the consistency of the page layout, which varies only in color, and I thought the illustrations were fabulous. Seriously, this is the type of kid-geared art that I would put on my walls.

I didn't appreciate the actual rule-related content so much, though. First of all, I was frustrated by the presence of a few comma errors throughout the book- you'd think a work like this would be exempt from that kind of mistake. It's definitely not something that a kid reader would notice, but I have a problem with it nonetheless. Speaking of kid readers, I'm not totally sure that this book would actually work for a younger audience. I found some of the rule descriptions confusing, and I worry that this book will do more to overburden kids with complicated information than to actually help them improve as writers.

For example, here's the description for metaphors:
If they look like birds, tweet like birds, and fly like birds, then Andrew and Luke are probably birds. But as a metaphor, Andrew is a person who likes to wake up early, and Luke is someone who stay up late. Metaphors pack a punch because they make direct comparisons. In a metaphor, Andrew isn't like a bird that chirps when the sun rises, he is an early bird. Metaphors create vivid mental images and help readers quickly understand your ideas. And unlike analogies, they usually don't require any extra explanation.

I don't think that this description would have made any sense to me as an elementary school kid; it hardly makes sense to me now! Why doesn't Fiedler lead with some kind of suggestion that Andrew and Luke are being described as an early bird and night owl? The first sentence complicates the explanation by trying to connect it to a cliche that kids probably won't recognize anyway, and it fails to establish the situation clearly. I will allow that metaphors are hard to describe, but I'm SURE that there's a clearer way to explain the "like" vs. "is" difference between similes and metaphors than by simply stating that Andrew is a bird- the whole point is that he isn't a bird but is being compared to one with a specific figurative device.

Other rules are explained more clearly, but overall I found this book very inconsistent in terms of its efficacy.

Art gets an A+++, though!

I received a digital review copy of this book from Edelweiss.