Playtime & Mealtime (Iggy Iguanodon: Time to Read, Level 2)

by Maryann Macdonald, Jo Fernihough (Illustrator)

Overview

Iggy is just like all young dinosaurs. He wants to play with his older brother, and he doesn't want to eat his green ferns.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807536421
Publisher:	Whitman, Albert & Company
Publication date:	10/01/2020
Series:	Time to Read
Pages:	48
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	5 - 7 Years

About the Author

Maryann Macdonald is the Kirkus-starred author of twenty-five books for children, among them the new Iggy Iguanodon series. She has also been published by Dial Books and HMH Books for Young Readers, among others. Maryann’s love of books and reading began when she was growing up in a family of ten outside Detroit. Maryann lives in New York.

Jo Fernihough studied at Central St. Martin’s where she gained her Degree and Post Graduate Diploma in Illustration. She went on later to complete her Masters at Cambridge School of Art in Book Illustration for Children. Jo started illustrating for editorial clients while still at college and has been doing so now for over twenty years. She lives and works in Cambridge.

Editorial Reviews

2020-07-14
A little dinosaur navigates friendships and new foods in this early reader.

In “Playtime,” the first of this volume’s two stories, Mama tells Iggy that he’s to have a play date with Murka Macrosaur. Iggy’s afraid that she’ll be into girly things like princesses, but instead the two try a variety of different outdoor activities before settling on a ring toss that utilizes Triceratops Murka’s pointy nose. “Mealtime” sees Iggy eyeing a dinner of ferns with great suspicion. He’d much rather eat flowers, but even after Papa says he can’t have them until he tries his ferns, it takes Grandpa’s subtle intervention to convince the young dino to attempt something new. An opening key ranks the text as Level 2, defined as “Reading With Help.” With such words as Iguanodon, tagalong, Macrosaur, and triceratops on the first nine pages alone, that help will be sorely needed, especially for young readers who don’t already know their dinosaur names. Elegant writing does not mitigate this problem (“But Murka gets stuck in somersaults, the same as all triceratops”). Meanwhile, cumbersome, inexpressive art does little to distract from the text, and the absence of outlines around the uniformly green dinos makes compositions where bodies overlap particularly confusing. Finally, this may be set in the Cretaceous, but what really feels ancient are elements like an apron-wearing mom, a father as disciplinarian, and a grandfather who smokes a pipe. Companion title Bath Time & Bedtime publishes simultaneously.

Iguano-don’t bother. (Early reader. 5-7)

Kirkus Reviews