Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3633 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Board book
• 20 pages

Amazon.com
The most fascinating part of an animal, in the minds of many young children, is the tail. Not only do kids lack such appendages, they've been told that, as tempting as they are to yank on, tails are not to be touched. Fortunately, this charming, texture-rich board book (with patches of real fake fur!) is the next best thing. A vast menagerie of cartoonish critters play and scamper around the pages of Matthew Van Fleet's Tails sporting tails of all types: bumpy alligator tails, fuzzy tiger tails, and even slightly stinky scratch-and-sniff skunk tails. Children can pull the tabs to make some of the tails wag or swish. The story line is minimal, as animals lounge about playing with one another and generally having good-natured fun. Catchy rhyming verse ("Tails fluffy, tails stringy, scaled tails strong and clingy. Tails long. Tails stumpy, pulling tails makes snoozers grumpy") keeps the action moving along and encourages young readers eager to turn the page. Shoddy construction can often spell doom for lift-the-flap and touch-and-feel children's books but Tails is every bit as well-designed as it is well-written and illustrated. (Preschool) --John Moe

Review
"A waggish survey of the animal world's very own happy endings." (Parenting Magazine )

Review
"A waggish survey of the animal world's very own happy endings."

Customer Reviews

"Finger-tickling fun for toddlers"...crushing tedium for their parents
A well-meaning friend gave us this book, along with a bunch of others, and all I can say is that the other ones were infinitely better. It's true that our little girl (less than 2) is pretty keen on the book, but within a matter of months she had ripped out the waggling tails and I had grown very, very tired of the artist's limited repertoire of facial expressions, jokes, limp rhymes and cutesy-cuddly anthropomorphic animals. A sign of how much it compels our own toddler is that by now, she is only interested in the (admittedly mildly impressive) peacock. Elsewhere, you too will get bored and irritated by the sheer repetitiveness of it all, not to mention the actually kind of nauseating smell of the scratch & sniff skunk's tail.

There are a number of other books for very small kids that I would recommend more than this one. Judith Kerr's 'The Tiger Who Came To Tea', for example, is a truly strange and mysterious story that our girl returns to over and over again. 'Tails', however, is a one-joke book which tries to be educational but which is meanwhile relentlessly inaccurate from a zoological point of view - if you're going to show something about animals that doesn't actually feature them as characters, you could at least show them behaving in something like the ways they really behave, instead of having lions cheerfully hanging out with porcupines. Avoid.

Excellent diction, hilarious pictures, fun for adults

Disclaimer: my wife used to work for the publisher (we
got it free along with every other new release). This
was by far the most fun of any of them. We bought several
extra copies for gifts to friends.

Great book to read to pre-readers. Too many complex and unusual
words for learning to read. The pull out fun (and wagging tails)
are made of many layers of cardboard, so it lasts a lot longer
than most active books.

lots of fun
Bought this for our 15-month old--he loves all the different textures and turned the nice big pages. And mom & dad learned about new animals too (pangolin??). However, I think he is a little young for it because he pulled out some of the tabs that make the tails move--they are sturdy enough we can repair it, but we may put the book away for awhile until he's a bit older.