Children's Book Review: Isabella Babysits Baxter

Good Books can be great emotional anchors for your life.  And, believe me, I telling you this from experience. But despite knowing and experiencing the power of magnetic books, I’ve miserably failed to influence my nine-year-old son to do the same. That is to read and get inspired from books. He dislikes them like bitter gourd…bitter and utterly distasteful. You need to literally pin him down to read a few pages of any book. Maybe, the books that I give him are not his type. But give him any book on dinosaurs and he will devour on it, day in and day out. Not to mention the book on sea monsters. But for me these dinosaur books are like bitter gourd…the less you read them the better.

So finding this picture book ‘Isabella Babysits Baxter’ by Merissa Perry Moraja was like an oasis in the desert. The colorful pics and the short descriptions did for him, which my volley of verbal confrontation didn't. Fully mesmerized, Aryan, my son, went on to read it a record two times. (Initially, we both got together and read it out aloud and that got him going, or so it seems. So it brings the total to three times.) Yes, the descriptions are super short and to the mark. Most importantly, you can read it one sitting. In fact, I’ve inspired Aryan to write a book review as well, which he will post on his blog as well as on Amazon.  

I am happy, for I’ve successfully inspired him to take baby steps toward reading non-dinosaur books.

Story In A Nutshell

Isabella is a sweet like kid with working parents. She has a pet dog Baxter for company. Baxter is mischievous and left to its own devices he’s known to wreak havoc in the house. So Isabella’s artist’s mother who works from home, requests her daughter to babysit Baxter for sometime. However, instead of keeping Baxter in leash, the mischievous duo got together and brought the house down.  However, Isabella’s mother is patient enough and doesn’t lose her temper when she sees the house is in a mess. Instead she takes both her daughter and dog for a walk.

Children from 4 to 9 years are sure to enjoy this book. Highly recommended.

The new words Aryan got to jot down in his dictionary are:  Enormous, Strolled, Cuddled, Curious, and Siblings, apart from Yikes and Yipppeee.

 This book review is part of motherdaughterbookreviews.com