nerd teacher [books] reviewed How to Catch a Star by Oliver Jeffers (The Boy, #1)
A Little Cute?
3 stars
I'm currently reading a bunch of children's books to help find some that I can share with students and build a tiny library of books I can share with them.
For this book, the concept is rather adorable, in terms of a small child wanting to catch a star to befriend it. It's somewhat creative and can be useful to further developing stories. In some respects, it feels either like the book's marketing is trying to make it feel like it's more than a simple story and is a "lesson to learn," but that lesson gets muddled at the end because... the boy does find a star in the ocean that washed up on the shore! And... I don't know, that seems more like the 'friend' is a starfish that might be unhappy being friends with someone who makes it stay out of the water for longer than it possibly …
I'm currently reading a bunch of children's books to help find some that I can share with students and build a tiny library of books I can share with them.
For this book, the concept is rather adorable, in terms of a small child wanting to catch a star to befriend it. It's somewhat creative and can be useful to further developing stories. In some respects, it feels either like the book's marketing is trying to make it feel like it's more than a simple story and is a "lesson to learn," but that lesson gets muddled at the end because... the boy does find a star in the ocean that washed up on the shore! And... I don't know, that seems more like the 'friend' is a starfish that might be unhappy being friends with someone who makes it stay out of the water for longer than it possibly can exist.
If the previous marketing (or at least the people who are marketing this on teacher blogs) would stop trying to make this a book about "learning to be friends" (which, if this is a starfish, the boy... did not learn how to be his friend and was quite selfish!), then the story itself would be fine on its own terms.
