Candy and the Cankersaur by Jason Sandberg

 

I’ll be honest for a moment. My blog isn’t all that popular and I get that, but I have fun doing that and that’s all that matters to me. I use my blog to seek out advanced reader copies of books so I can feed my addiction for good books. This is one of the few books that I have been sought out to read by an author. I don’t have much time to sit down and read these days because work keeps me busy when I’m there and my kids and wife get my attention when I’m home. I tend to not request books that aren’t comics and I read mostly audio books. Well, this is a kids picture book and like always, I jumped at the chance to read a book to my kiddos. 

I took a chance and thanked the author for sending it. Jason was great getting back to me when I had questions about this book and that really helped me plan out this review. Most kids books have some sort of lesson to learn by the end of it; like eat your vegetables, be nice to your sister, brush your teeth. This book was a little harder to pin down a lesson so I asked the author what he meant to convey. There are a couple messages in this book and not all of them are for the kiddos.

The first lesson to learn was tricky because the main character candy isn’t the one who learns it. Her neighbor Chucky is the one who learns that it is not nice to be greedy and jealous. The second lesson is for the parents. Don’t be so wrapped up in your own lives that you miss some of the best years of your child’s life. The final lesson kind of pokes fun at the “Moral of the Story” aspect and is more a joke our lovable dino learns.

I want to point out that the art work in this book was really pretty good. All of this was done by the author Jason Sanders. It is great when a writer is talented enough to do his (or her) own illustrations. I really respect that because I am terrible at drawing that that is one of the main reasons I will never write comics or children’s books. Jason even gives a little nod to a certain monkey and his friend in the tall hat. My son and daughter pointed this out right away and got a kick out of this. I was very impressed by the classic style Jason used to make this book look like the kids books I read as a child.

On to the rating, I like my children’s books to have a more front and center meaning instead of the multiple messages in this book. I also thought the book was cute but not over the top awesome. I would rate this a 3 out of 5 but since both of my kids enjoyed this book and asked for a second reading I have to give it a 4 because they got a kick out of it and that is really the goal of a kid’s book. To finish off my review I will leave you with a quote from Jason himself. I asked him if there was anything he wanted to say about his book and this is what he said: “My goal is to make richly illustrated children’s books that aren’t a drag for parents to read (and reread) to their kids”