Dorothy Dustbucket - Christina B. Bianco - ★★★
GENRE: Children's Picture Book.
RATING: 3 stars.
In a Nutshell: A sweet kiddie book about a magical cleaning fairy, but will work even better with some finetuning.
Written from the first person point of view of a little girl, the narrator tells us of how a fairy named Dorothy stays in the loft of their new house and magically cleans up all their mess at night, while her parents are clueless about who’s handling the clean-up chores.
By itself, the story is quite sweet. Who among us wouldn’t want a Dorothy at our place to deal with the endless cleaning and dusting and washing up? I am sure parents will empathise with this point even more.
Dorothy is shown to be quite handy at most of her tasks, though she does goof up at times by not understanding modern devices such as dryers and phones. Kids will enjoy seeing her antics. I hope kids also realise how she doesn’t discriminate between chores and handles all work with a smile on her face – a good lesson to learn. (for adults as well.)
The book is written in rhythmic prose in the ABAB rhyming scheme. The poetic meter was consistent almost throughout the book, which is quite read-aloud friendly. However, a few of the rhymes felt quite forced. The text also had minor grammatical issues in terms of tenses (switches between past and present), word usage errors and fragmented sentences. This might not bother most readers, but I am a bit of a Grammar Nazi, especially when it comes to children’s books as early readers rely on books for their language development.
One thing the book could have developed even better was in ensuring continuity. Dorothy tackles a wide range of activities, so it was fun to see her navigate a day across the whole house rather than being restricted to only a couple of chores or rooms. But if one page shows Dorothy hanging the clothes to dry, the next page can’t have her swinging in a dryer. These are relatively minor issues, but they could certainly help in enhancing our reading experience further.
The illustrations are quite cute and quirky. Due to the clear white background, the bright pastel colours pop up on the page. The illustrator keeps the colour tone simple and the designs minimalistic, thereby making the overall effect rather bright and striking.
On the whole, this debut indie work presents a fun tale with a loveable fairy character. If it fine-tunes the continuity issues and resolves the grammatical errors, it will be a nice addition to your little one’s library. The official target reading age is 2-6 years, and due to the nature of the story, it will work very well for bedtime reading.
3 stars.
My thanks to Zooloo’s Book Tours and author Christina B. Bianco for a complimentary copy of “Dorothy Dustbucket”, and for allowing me to be a part of this blog tour. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
The book is available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Author Christina B. Bianco:
Christina has had a successful career in the Art, Design and TV Industry before owning her very own Art Gallery.
Inspired by her love of reading and doodling, Christina decided to put pen to paper and create 'Dorothy Dustbucket.'
Splitting time between Europe and the UK, she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire, along with her husband and two children, who provided much of the inspiration for the children's books.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Check out this book:
Buy Link: https://mybook.to/DorothyDustbucket-zbt
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This has been a pitstop on the #Dorothy Dustbucket blog tour conducted by Zooloo's Book Tours. (@ZooloosBookTours on Insta) Thanks for stopping by!
Thank you so much for kicking off the tour today and sharing your fab review x
ReplyDelete