Lost in a Good Book

Published: 1 January 2016
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Illustrator: Aaron Blabey
Pages: 32
Format: Picture Book
★   ★   ★   ★  – 4 Stars

This is the book for me because it highlights my own pet peeve about calling koalas koala bears. It frustrates me to no end, so I sympathise with this koala. It’s worse too because for all the people joking about it, or saying it knowing it isn’t true, there are people out there believing it. There can only be koalas. Unless there is some cross species with a drop bear that gets a koala bear sub species a koala is a koala is a koala.

But that is beside the point.

I am falling in love with Blabey’s rhyming style. I don’t recall liking it as much with the Thelma books, that was more typical picture book rhyme, and I certainly didn’t notice with Pig the Pug, probably because I dislike Pig the Pug so much I wasn’t enjoying any of it. But I’m glad I’ve finally started reading these books because I can learn to love Blabey instead for these remarkable picture books. I must track down some others and see if they are all this fun or whether there’s going to be hits and misses as I’ve already seen.

The writing makes this a great book to read aloud or to yourself, it flows wonderfully, you keep the rhythm going as the story read like a poem. Blabey gets the humour, the melody and the tone right even as his characters become exasperated and frustrated it still works perfectly.

It’s fascinating reading picture books and noticing how differently a story flows depending on the rhyme. There’s fast rhythms and ones that slow your pacing, then there’s some that read like a story but happen to have rhyming in it but you read it just the same. Then there’s others where you are compelled to change your tone and pace as you read, rhythm and speed changing on the various rhymes. It’s amazing how you can do so much with words on a page to make the reading experience different. This is why I like Blabey because even with rhymes in his books, they are all read in different ways with different rhythms.

What also makes this book great is it plays with the formatting, the font, and the size. The position of the characters and the layout of the full page illustrations all play into the reading experience. I adored the illustrations, they were cute, creative, and they told a story themselves. Koala is a great character, their frustrations and exasperation add to the delight of reading without ever become over the top. Their humour and temper work well, and being adorable in little outfits is always a bonus. There’s fun facts, there’s jokes and a little bit of history in there, but there’s also delight in watching the little koala try their best to educate and still falling short because it’s hard to escape how they look.

You can purchase Don’t Call Me Bear via the following

 QBD | Booktopia |

Dymocks | Angus and Robinson

 Fishpond | Amazon | Amazon Aust