Fruit Salad

An information book, this, and as such treading very tricky ground. It is notoriously difficult to write non-fiction books for young children; the balance between too much information and not enough, between simple language and complex subject is hard to strike. Althea has often managed it very well. I am not sure she has with this one. The idea of a book to tell you about the fruits that you might find in a fruit salad (and a 'multi-cultural' one at that) is good. Food is a favourite topic for infant work. The pictures are super, good enough to eat, and the facts are, of course, accurate. But there is that problem of balance. Is a child who needs to be told that apples grow on trees going to make anything of being told that figs are pollinated internally by a wasp which enters through a hole in the fruit?

Still, as resource for pictures and a reminder of the wide variety of fruit in the world, this is a useful book; its text will need care however.