How to Tie a Shoe: & Other Big Adventures (Penny Candy Handbooks)

This book is not what I expected at all. I expected it to be a book on how to tie a shoe, not how it feels to tie a shoe in poetry form. It is a good how-to poem book for students, but I think that needs to be specified on the cover that that is what this is. I might have bought it to teach my children to tie their shoes and been extremely disappointed.

I like that the book is about something every kid must learn to do. It is a good example of poetry and how to use feelings in poetry. I think it would be a good example to read in a third-to-fifth-grade class.

I think the illustrations are an interesting style, being black and white. It has an older child vibe, but I am not sure seven-to-eleven-year-olds will be engaged with the pictures. It is not my favorite style of pen and ink. Some of the pages just seem a little jumbled without color. The characters lack emotion. I honestly just did not enjoy it.

I read the book to my six-year-old and he did not seem very engaged. He just told me he didn’t like the book.

In conclusion, I think this book needs some work on specifying what type of book it is, and the illustrations need a bit more work if it is going to be engaging to children.