Peter is Just a Baby by Marisabina Russo

Title: Peter is Just a Baby
Author: Marisabina Russo
Publication Date: November 11, 2011
Publisher: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers

In Peter is Just a Baby, the older sister relates all the things that she can do that Peter can't like using big words, learning French, and dancing.  The story is cute as it leads up to Peter's first birthday and the sister hoping that Peter will now be able to do some of the things that she can do.

I love the way this book is illustrated. The characters are bears and the illustrations are soft. The pictures match the text very well and flow easily on the pages. Some of the pages have several smaller pictures illustrating different activities while other pages have one large picture. This makes the book more visually interesting than having one large picture on each page and it also allows for more activities to be shown. The book has really nice use of white space for the text as well. Some picture books are difficult to read if the text is placed directly over the illustration but this book avoids that issue completely. The text also flows well around the pictures which keeps the narrative moving visually.

Although there is a glossary in the front of the book with the French terms including pronunciation and definition, I didn't care for the use of French throughout the text. I took French in high school and am somewhat comfortable with the pronunciations but I can see the foreign words being a turn off to parents who are not familiar with the language. I know I don't like reading a story to my daughter if I am uncertain of how to pronounce some of the words. This is really the only thing that I didn't enjoy about this book though.

I received an advance copy of Peter Is Just a Baby from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program in exchange for providing my honest review.

Interestingly enough, Amazon.com shows a shipping time for this book of 3 to 5 weeks, meaning it would not arrive until after Christmas, but Eerdmans Books for Young Readers shows a shipping time of only 3 days.



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