Taking a literary classic and distilling it down into a board book that has just over 150 words is no small feat. It’s an even taller order to make it from intellectual property that’s known to any child over six years old. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, let’s make the art so beautiful and engaging that a 12-year-old stops and says, “great art”. Baby Classics, Frankenstein grabs your attention from its cover and continues its handle on you throughout the book.
The shape of Baby Classics, Frankenstein helps its appeal also. It’s shaped like an illustrated book, where it’s taller than it is long. This makes it very simple to turn and allows crawlers through early elementary to ‘read’ a book like a big kid. There comes a point where reading a square, board book, regardless of how advanced the content is, just doesn’t appeal to kids of a certain age.
Yeah, it’s a board book, but the art in this board book is far from common. The characters are not rounded too much, they’re realistic, in an all-age graphic novel way, and have so much detail in each two-page spread that even older readers will circle back to get another look. I’ll go back to our middle school reader once more who chimed in with, “great art”, when I asked him about the book.
Frankenstein is one of those classic characters that people know but probably have never read. I’ve never read the original source material by Mary Shelley. In college, I saw the original film from the 1930s, knew the classic names, some of the quotes, and even dredged through some of the unfortunate remakes. The story is still amazing, and presented in this form, is great entertainment for kids one and up.
Yeah, this is, after all, a board book, whose bread and butter are those crawlers through early elementary readers who might need pages that are durable. They need durability, but they want creative, fun, engaging, and smart, which Baby’s Classics, Frankenstein delivers in an unexpected way. I say unexpected because people are not expecting Frankenstein to be palatable to younger audiences in a way that’s true to the source material.
Again, I haven’t read the source material for Frankenstein. However, the story in Baby’s Classics, Frankenstein is not the soft, Hollywood version of the story that you might be expecting. He’s a good scientist who just wants to bring his subject to life. However, once that happens the doctor runs away and his monster runs into the country where he secretly befriends a family of farmers. While somewhat content in his fringe-farmer lifestyle, the monster wants a friend, and he wants the doctor to make one.
The monster chases the doctor, throws away his science journals, has remorse, and then chases the monster to the North Pole. It’s here where we see the monster sail away on an iceberg to parts unknown where he may, or may not, meet the love he so desperately seeks.
Baby’s Classics Frankenstein is a board book that makes older readers curious about the book that inspired it. It’s also entertaining, and age-appropriate for those crawlers to hear the story, as well as, look at the pictures. And in case you hadn’t heard, the book has “great art”.
Baby’s Classics Frankenstein is adapted by A. H. Hill, with art by Greg Paprocki and available on Starry Forest Books.
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