Stars: ***1/2
Children’s Picture Book
Verbal Images Press (Sept 2009)
ISBN: 978-0-9821982-0-9
32 pages Children 7-9
Summary: Alex wants a cookie. If he could just read the directions on his mother’s grabber device, he could adapt it for his own use! School difficulties and a session with a psychologist help identify Alex’s learning disability. His teacher and parents help him use his admiration for Thomas Edison (who had a learning disability) to keep trying new ways to loearn and to successfully invent a Cookie Snatcher. Revisions from the 1996 edition include new 4-color illustrations, updated text to reflect current education practices and the hero’s invention differs from the original one.
This book is one of three in The Coping Series by Jeanne Gehret, M.A. Alex’s disability is more of Dyslexia than ADD/ADHD but that topic is covered in the two books whose reviews are coming in the next two days.
I’d like to share a fact regarding this book:
“In 1989, educational consultants informed Jeanne Gehret and her husband that their learning-disabled son, then 6, might never learn to read. The first book in The Coping Series, The Don’t-Give-Up Kid was written just after diagnosis to portray the best possible outcome for him, and was the first book that he ever read on his own. In 2000, he graduated cum laude from college.”
In this book Alex is frustrated at not being able to read but once he is diagnosed (they never actually say Dyslexia although that seems to be the problem) he is placed in a special class where a teacher plays games with him and two other students to help them. He has trouble reading, one can read but has trouble writing and the other has trouble speaking. I like how this shows the different varieties of learning disabilities so a child doesn’t say well my problem isn’t like that and think the book doesn’t apply to him/her.
The illustrations by Michael LaDuca are kind of cute, both realistic and cartoonish at the same time if that’s possible.
Thanks to KSB Promotions and Jeanne Gehret, M.A. for the opportunity to read this book.
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