This story tells the tale of the babysitting adventures of Max, Anabel, and Brody. While her Uncle Brody wanted to put Anabel down for a nap, Anabel still wanted to play. She went to her Uncle Max, and asked him to go outside with her. They decided on jumping on the trampoline until they came upon a situation. This is a lovely book about responsibility and trust. I would love to have this book in my classroom library, and would suggest this to my fellow teachers as well! ( )

This was a fun adventure with a bunch of different animals. A puppy came to visit and they had an incodent where the dog gets stuck in a tree. ( )

In my opinion this book is just okay. I enjoyed the book because of the numerous colorful illustrations. There was an illustration on every page. The picture took up the entire pages with the writing on top. This kept me engaged and allowed me to follow the plot while the wording got a little confusing at times. Each picture was done with immense amounts of color all beautiful and engaging. I also enjoyed the story because of the way the author chose write the characters talking. When a character would be yelling and progressively getting louder, the author would increase the font size a little at a time. This allowed for me to read the text out loud the way the author intended for it to sound when he was writing it.
While there were aspects of the book that I enjoyed, there were also some aspects that took away from my over all excitement when reading this book. There were too many characters for me to keep track of! They were all animals and the author could have easily putt “Broody, the dog” but instead he would just put the name of the character. This required me to constantly go back and try to figure out who was who. This took away from my over all reading experience. Along with the characters being hard to keep track of, the plot was also scattered all over the place and at times it was hard for me as a reader to keep track of what was going on. The characters would all be doing several different things that the same time and it was hard for me to figure out who was doing what and why.
The over all message of the book was that children, or in this case, puppies, are a lot of work and take a lot of time. This message was not easily perceived. I had to take a moment after reading and really try to think about what had gone on and what the author was trying to tell me. As I stated earlier, I believe the book was just okay and that with some changes to the character and the plot the author would be able to make the message of the book more clear and the over all theme more cohesive and understandable. ( )

Max, the duck, and Brody, the dog, babysit Anabel, the puppy. This is a fun little book to read to little ones. ( )

My review is here: http://readitagainmom.blogspot.com/2010/04/sitting-duck-by-jackie-urbanovic.html ( )