The best Disney Storybook ever?
Written: Jul 17 '04 (Updated Jul 19 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Wonderful easy to read stories. Full page, full color film animation.
Cons: Eccentric story selection. Very heavy and not suitable for travelling.
The Bottom Line: Excellent value story book for children. Features pictures from animated films and easy to read stories. Kids spend hours with it and keep coming back for more!
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| dhandforth's Full Review: Disney's Read to Me Treasury Volume One Books |
How can parents afford to keep kids interested in reading?
I have a two year old girl and seven year old boy. Both are voracious readers. We can set either kid in front of the appropriate book and not be bothered by them for sometimes up to an hour at a time. We’ve developed the habit of getting the older kid to read before bed time (we call this quiet time). We read to the little one, and then let her flip through the book by herself before bedtime.
The problem is that I find it harder and harder to keep buying them new books. New books are expensive, sometimes costing up to $20, and my kids tend to chew through them after about a half dozen reads (costing about $3 for every trip through the average tome). What is worse is that my kids have “taste”, and will not just sit for any old book. This meant that we started haunting used bookstores looking for bargain children’s books.
Imagine our surprise in finding this wonderful series of books in one of the bargain bins! This is the first book in a series of what is currently 3 volumes of Disney’s animated movies collected into story books: Disney’s Read to Me Treasury.
This has got to be one of the best undiscovered deals in the children’s picture books!
THE STORIES:
These oversized hardcover picture books re-tell stories from Disney’s most popular animated films. Volume One contains:
Snow White, retold by Liza Baker
Bambi, retold by Liza Baker
Cinderella, retold by Della Cohen
The Little Mermaid, retold by Amy Edgar
Beauty and the Beast, retold by Ellen Teitlebaum and
The Lion King, retold by Liza Baker
The stories are concisely retold with full color illustrations taken from the actual animated film. The plots are complete and match the movie’s storyline. Each story is around 65 pages long and no page has more than fifty words on it. The words are lively and easy to read. A typical excerpt might read in big print (this one is from Cinderella):
Next, the Fairy Godmother turned Cinderella’s torn dress into a beautiful gown. In a flash, there were also tiny glass slippers for her feet. “On the stroke of midnight, the spell will be broken,” the Fairy Godmother warned. “Everything will be as before.”
That’s it for the entire two pages of pictures.
This is simple enough that my seven year old can read it to my two year old daughter. And he enjoys looking at the pictures, recognizing almost all of them from familiar Disney DVD’s.
The editors also write a short introduction with tips to parents on how to read aloud to children. The stories are even split into chapters so that youngsters with shorter attention spans can listen to the next chapter later. Although my kids love the stories so much that they make me read it all the way through and then make me do the whole thing over again.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Did I mention that these are pictures taken directly from the animation? So these are the same pictures that the kids see on the video or DVD.
The sturdy cover features pictures from the six stories, so that young children can point to the story that they want to hear before the book is cracked open.
Each story is fully illustrated with striking brightly colored pictures that could have come from the original film cels. So Cinderella is dances in the beautiful blue silk dress. Belle dances with the beast while the clock and the candlestick sing. And Ariel dreams of Eric as Flounder keeps her company.
The pictures are usually full paged, and sometime spread over two pages for a truly panoramic scene (such as the forest fire in Bambi).
These are glossy pages with all of Disney’s famous colors, shading, and pen lines of the movie animations. The pictures are uncluttered and beautiful to look at. My daughter really likes comparing all of the different princesses: Snow White, Ariel, Cinderella, and Belle.
There is also enough detail in the pictures to keep the kids coming back to their favorite scenes.
THE CRITIQUE
My kids love this book. My two year old brings it to me for her bedtime reading every night. She loves Cinderella. When I have to be out late, my son sometimes fills in for me and reads the stories to her. It is a wonderful way to wean them from the TV.
This first volume is a girl’s book. The stories feature princes, princesses, evil witches and castles. There are some dark elements to the stories---matching the movies and the original Grimm’s fairy tales. Still, the bright picture and fast action are more than enough to tip the scales towards entertainment.
My gripes about this book have to do with story selection: including the Lion King and Bambi seem a little out of place in a chiefly medieval themed book. I would have preferred Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty instead.
For some parents, the high gloss thick covered 400 page book could be very heavy to lug around. It weighs in at over 5lbs. Almost as much as my laptop computer. Not a problem for home reading, but a pain to carry around for road trips.
This book is around $18 new and can be found online like-new for under $10. Considering that we paid almost $10 for just the Lion King (at 40 pages) last year, this book is a major BARGAIN.
BITS AND BOBS
Disney’s Read to Me Treasury Volume One (of Three) has no age recommendations, but I feel that it is for children of all ages: particularly if they are between 2 and 8.
The book is written by four authors and the illustrations are from the original motion picture animations.
Disney Press published this 400 page hardcover book in 2001. It sells for a cover price of $19.99 US and $27.00 CAN.
ISBN: 078683285-1
Link to review on Volume Two:
Disney's Read to Me Volume Two.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dhandforth
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Member: Dean Handforth
Location: Pasadena, CA
Reviews written: 103
Trusted by: 35 members
About Me:
"Those who would trade liberty for security will have neither..." James Madison
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