Author: Daddy Mojo

Pity the white crayon. Those books or shows always poke fun of white because it can’t be seen. So Much Snow is a picture book that takes that thought, turns it on its head, and shakes it up for good measure. It’s a ridiculous, wonderful wordless book that takes the white, fluffy stuff that some people see in winter and makes it into a temporary Rorschach test for anyone who picks it up. Whenever a book crosses our desk that shakes up how you view things it’s a special thing, and So Much Snow does just that.

I’m a casual Star Trek fan. The most current spate of movies was OK, and I haven’t seen any of the three recent television shows. If that downgrades my level of Star Trek fandom then I’ll reset my phasers to busy. Star Trek: Trek the Halls is a holiday book that is laden with tribbles, puns, and references to classic characters. It’s an illustrated book that will send those Star Trek fans to their happy place.

I’m trying to remove any negative bias that I have against celebrity authors. This is a work in progress because the vast majority of times that I read one, it’s a disappointment. Also, in my perfect world, every child would learn a second language. The youngest child that I taught when I was an ESL teacher overseas was six months old. I mention that to illustrate that crawlers and toddlers have not built up the learning resistance to education. At that age, it’s all play, and learning through play is awesome. Immersion language study is far and away best way to get kids fluent in a second or third language. Now, in what may be our longest introduction ever, Con Pollo has great intentions but falls short on its main goal.

The subtitle to Con Pollo is A Bilingual Playtime Adventure. As our (very long) introduction implies, we love the goal of that. It’s an illustrated book that will introduce a handful of new words in a different language through happy characters in a relaxed setting. Indeed, we see a chicken, and as Breaking Bad fans already know, that’s a pollo on the front cover saying “Hola”.

Pollo wants to play all day and the book shows us examples of what she likes to do. She goes to the beach, plays soccer, goes skateboarding, dances, visits school, the library, stores, makes something, flies a plane, and looks at the stars. The text is presented in simple sentences with large font and bright colors that show pollo doing all of those things.

The illustrations are by Andrea Campos and are cute, engaging, and just the sort of thing that ages one and up will be attracted to.

Our biggest issue with Con Pollo, A Bilingual Playtime Adventure is that there is an astonishing absence of Spanish. There are 13 Spanish words in the book. There are more than 200 words in English. This is an easy reader book that’s intended to be read to young audiences while the reader and the audience are having fun and getting introduced to some key Spanish nouns and verbs.

Now, assuming that is the main goal of the book, why are there so few Spanish words? My rough math tells me that 6% of this bilingual playtime adventure book is in a different language other than English. For a book that retails for $18.99 you’ll be able hire a Spanish tutor to play with your child for 45 minutes. Alternatively, you can purchase a book that has dozens upon dozens more words in the language that you’d like for them to learn and does it with just as much fun, but not as much brand name.

For us, it’s like advertising an early illustrated book for kids that love dinosaurs and then having a human talk to them about the big lizards for 94% of the book.

Secondarily, the book is written by Jimmy Fallon and Jennifer Lopez. If you were to say that Lopez wrote the words in Spanish and Fallon the English words that’s a 94/6 split, but co-collaborators probably don’t work like that. This is where the negative bias in me rears its head like a three-day-old whitehead that’s sensitive to the touch. It’s the kind where you can feel it pulsing, just begging for attention, but you know that it’ll go away on its own, kind of like bad advertising.

In the end, Con Pollo is a book that might attract some parents who are Fallon or Lopez fans, but that’s the extent of it. There’s not enough Spanish in the book to legitimately call it a bilingual adventure. Certainly, there are some Spanish words, but if the goal of your book buck is to teach young children a second language then your time will be spent better elsewhere.

Con Pollo, A Bilingual Playtime Adventure is by Jimmy Fallon and Jennifer Lopez with illustrations by Andrea Campos and is available on Feiwel and Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing. 

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When most elementary-aged children are shown Van Dog, they won’t understand it. Heck, I’m decades older than an elementary student and I’m 100% confident that I don’t understand every inference, cultural nod, or artist’s reference in Van Dog. The obvious fact that the painting dog is certainly supposed to be a canine representation of Van Gogh, I got that one. After that, it’s up for grabs, but the one takeaway that every reader will walk away with; is that Van Gogh is a big, colorful, mostly-wordless, illustrated book that’s loaded with infectious energy.