As I continue my 31-Day Challenge, here is my post for the day 3 challenge – write a review. As we are also celebrating  Children’s Book Week this week, and my posts for Thursday were initially planned to be travel posts, the review of these children’s books covers just all of this perfectly!

Chouette Publishing

Our thoughts: These three books are a part of a series of travel books for children and what wonderful books they are!!! This series is a really cool concept making it fun for kids to learn about places to visit and interesting sights to see in a city while looking for monsters in each page of the book! Each page of the book mentions an attraction with an interesting fact or two about it; and your job (well, actually your child’s!) is to find the many monsters lurking on that page (but I competed with mine to find them; and I also need to say, none of my kids are little anymore at fourteen and eleven!!). The monsters are definitely hiding well so it takes some time to find all of them; the number of monsters on each page is helpfully pointed out by the host monster (pictured on the cover as well) at the bottom of the page.

The illustrations are bright, colorful, and fun while also being depicting the landmarks and attractions pretty accurately so that children can use that to recognize the real deal when visiting the city.  And I am sure that kids will enjoy pointing out the attractions they have already visited on books they are reading.

And the message that I think we can all take from these books – When (and where and how) cute little comic book monsters have fun exploring the city, we can have fun too –  so let us get out and explore!!!  I cannot wait to explore – the cities; and also more of these books.

I just wish that these books could have had a few more pages listing a few more attractions, to make them lots more fun.

A couple of comments on each one of these three:

San Francisco – well, this one is easily my favorite given we live in the San Fransisco Bay Area (in San Jose). Each attraction is a loved one; and many of them visited often; but we still have at least one spot mentioned in this book that we need to visit (and thanks to watching Full House, that attraction has moved up our list of pending attractions to visit; yes, the Painted Ladies)

New York – again, familiarity made the heart grow fonder here – having visited New York twice now (though over a decade ago), the landmarks were ones I could identify with and bring back memories; next up, visit them with the kids. And make sure we mark off all the spots in this book!

Chicago – one city we have not visited yet, but now I have a list of attractions handy with me for when we do plan our trip to the Windy City!!