Carlo Likes Reading

Carlo the giraffe loves to read - everything, everywhere, and to anyone who will listen. This picture book is not so much a story, rather a series of annotated spreads - bedroom, kitchen, market, garage, park, library and so on - in which almost every conceivable object in each bright, jolly scene is labelled with a tie-on tag. While I like the idea of using environmental print, this obsession with tags creates an artificiality: why not use realistic labels on items such as jam jars, milk cartons, food packets, etc. making the words an integral part of the whole? However, the plethora of tags does give touches of humour to the scenes: we have three tiny soap bubbles floating out of a bucket sporting large labels and a line of ants trailing tags past the sand pit. A single sentence 'Carlo reads...' in large bold type introduces each double spread making this an inviting proposition for beginner readers as well as an attractive word book to share with the very young.