Zanzibar Road, by Niki Daly (review)

We love to look for books with animal characters at the library, and that's exactly what drew us to Zanzibar Road, with its cover of whimsically drawn African animals. As I flipped through it initially, before we brought it home for the week, I was pleased to see that it was broken into five different short story chapters, one of my favorite things about books like Frog and Toad.

As it turns out, the book is cute but pretty one dimensional; it doesn't have any of the richness that makes the Frog and Toad stories such classics, and I can't really say it's well-endowed in the arena of the plot. One might even call it vapid, but a little humor here and a little problem-solving there keeps me from fully condemning it as such.

Even after that raving review, I can't really say that I dislike the book, I just don't really enjoy it, and there are so many better ones out there. Calvin, on the other hand, seems to enjoy it just fine, and although I would say he's not nearly as engaged with the story as he is with others, we all enjoy a little light reading from time to time, and this book is definitely that, with a little enjoyable whimsy on the side.