When I initially poured through the list of sites to be reviewed, the title Of Reading To My Kid immediately jumped out at me and I knew it was something I wanted to check out. As a fellow rapidly approaching 30, I have already begun a small library of children’s books for the child I hope to have someday – so the title definitely piqued my curiosity. Imagine my delight when I got to the weblog and found out its intent. The purpose of the blog, in the author’s own words is as follows :
The weblog is an exploration of the issues involved in children’s literature and reading to a child, which seems to me both political and emotional. It’s intended for parents, publishers, authors, critics, and anyone interested in books for young readers.
Fantastic! This would be something I would be very interested in, and I immediately plunged into the page.
The blog is written by the mother(referred to only as “E”) of a little girl who is referred to as “Tulip” – in homage to the character of the same name from the Rosemary Wells book, Benjamin and Tulip . The core of the blog is the review of all the books that the author reads to her little girl, and they are skillfully intertwined with a few short tales of her daughter’s exploits (Amazing Grace on the subway) which are always delightful to read. All the reviews are very well done, and I even picked up a few solid recommendations that I will have to look into. My only complaint, if you could call it that, was that there simply weren’t enough because the archives only went back to the beginning of February. I was able to read the entire site in one sitting, and found myself eager for more. This is a small bone of contention, however, as I am sure that the material will grow and grow over time.
The layout is very basic and is a page hosted on blogspot. Seeing as how this is a fairly new endeavor, I can understand hosting it there for now – everyone has to start somewhere. One thing that did interest me, though, was the incredible number of links on the sidebar that pointed to various other sources for children’s literature, and I thought this was simply fantastic.
The blog certainly wouldn’t be of interest to anyone who has no reason to be interested in children’s literature. To those who are interested, however, this page provides an invaluable resource in the way that it shows you both the good and bad points about the titles selected by the author, and does so in a friendly and easily readable way.
My suggestion to the author would be to continue the great work she’s doing and eventually looking at hosting the site on her own .com domain and sprucing up the presentation so it would be more easily accessible to the masses.
A fantastic site, with only the lack of material preventing it from being a perfect 5/5!