Dr. Seuss Books (so-so)
Overall, we love Dr. Seuss books. The silliness, the rhyming and the rhythm are all beneficial for little ones to hear. We started reading Dr. Seuss very young and certain ones are still requested regularly.
However, there is a wide range of books within the collection. Some are wonderful and really pull a little one in, some are iffy, and some are offensive. The ones here weren’t offensive in any way, but there is something odd that I didn’t feel great reading over and over to my little one, despite her reaction which in this list ranged from boredom to questioning to giggles.
If I Ran The Zoo (1950): I feel like this is one of the books that is considered a classic, but it wasn’t quite one of our favorites. I would bet most every little kid that visits the zoo dreams about the zoo in one way or the other, zoos are fascinating to little minds, but this story just had a bit too much of capturing and caging and a minor bit of ethnic stereotypes to make it to the favorites. The animals are a bit weird too, which was rather entertaining to my little one for some of them, but a bit scary for a few of them.
Daisy-Head Mayzie (1994): There’s nothing really wrong with this story, but there is a feeling with this one that I didn’t really like. It could have been the daisy out of her head, which took a long explanation to my little one that that really can’t happen, or it could have been the fact they talk about the flower and Daisy dying, which caused some deep concern by my little one. Or it could have been the narcissistic nature of the last part of the story with the Daisy show. Not really sure, but we almost ranked this as a skip.
Cautions: As we do in the rest of the big collections of books, we’ll mention the cautions in the individual book reviews above.
