Maisy Bakes a Cake

Lucy Cousins has produced a large number of brilliant Maisy Books in recent years but the factors that are so appealing about Maisy, including the bold, block colours, and the sense of dynamic movement, just don’t fit well with baking a cake or with specific object recognition. For example, a ‘cake tin’ looks like a smear of grey paint. The pop-up element does not help to create a sense of energy, mainly because pulling a tab to get Maisy to wash her hands or to see some dough rise does not produce a particularly interesting outcome. Overall there is a fundamental sense of confusion with the book – it has imagery suited to a 2-year-old, but includes concepts such as weight and time that most 6-year-olds would find hard to understand. As a ‘Maisy First Science Book’ it would appear that much of what makes Maisy so dynamic fails to translate into exciting preschool science.