The Very Best Hug - Smriti Prasadam-Halls - ★★★★

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AUTHOR: Smriti Prasadam-Halls

ILLUSTRATOR: Alison Brown
GENRE: Children's Picture Book.
RATING: 4 stars.

A cute story about who gives the BEST hug.

The child narrator is on the lookout for the “very best hug”. He tries various animals from koalas to rhinos to seahorses to skunks. Some hugs are good, some are okay. But after a long search, he realises that the best hugs come from much closer to home.

While the ending of the story is easy to guess, the journey to the discovery is fun. It was nice to see a wide range of wild animals in the content, ranging from popular ones such as koalas and rhinos and monkeys, to the exotic such as narwhals and porcupines and walruses. Surprisingly there were no pets or farm animals such as dogs, cats, horses or cows. I would have assumed these to be the first choice of a child searching for memorable hugs. Oh well!

The content is written in rhythmic prose. While the rhymes are a tad forced at times, they work mostly well for the book.

The vocabulary seems a bit difficult at times for the target age group of 2-5 years. Some of the tougher words can certainly be explained, but surely ‘rambunctious’ is too big a word for a picture book!

The illustrations left me mostly satisfied. Most of the animals are quite cutely drawn, and our little narrator is adorable with his curly mop of hair. The pages are bright and colourful. The only thing I didn’t like was the depiction of a couple of the animals such as the cobra and the penguins; they didn’t match their real-life avatars at all.

(Now that I think about it, the gender of the narrator isn’t specified in the story at all, and the way the character is drawn, the child could be a girl or a boy or any other gender. Chalk this as a plus for the book.)

Overall, a sweet book that could be a good way of encountering new animals, as well as learning plenty of new words in a fun way. The illustrations are a big plus.

My thanks to Bloomsbury Children's Books and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Very Best Hug”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

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