As a writer and illustrator of kids books, we like to think that we have an idea of what appeals to kids. And yet we are always surprised when our own kids fall in love with books we think are, ahem, not particularly, ahem, interesting or, ahem, well-written or well-drawn or, well, any good. So we thought it might be helpful to all of you out there to get a sense of what the kids are into these days.

And so we present to you:

our every-other-weekly book review by Alden and Kato.

I let them pick out the first book to review, and, I kid you not, they picked out our latest book Henny Wampum Had a Really Big Head. If you haven’t read it already, well, prepare for some spoilers.

To give you a sense of the book, here’s the description Matthew wrote up for our catalog:

So that is the summary. And here come the reviews:

Let’s start with Alden (age 5):

I like it. Because it’s one of your books. That’s the only reason.

Seriously. If we hadn’t spent days and nights discussing how we wanted to have kids’ book reviews on this blog as a regular feature, the review would have ended there. It took some major investigative chops to get her to elaborate any further.

So I asked, “What’s your favorite part of the story?”

To which she replied:

My favorite part of the story is when she got the cat down from the tree because it was like she was a real firefighter.

She’s talking about the final page of the book, where Henny has grown her arms and legs and body out to be proportionate to her head, and finds she can do great things like rescue kittens from trees and be a winning shortstop.

The ONLY reason this made any impression at all on Alden was that it happened to be the page we were turned to when I asked the question. Trying to probe a little further, I asked if there were any other parts of the story she liked.

She said:

I pretty much liked all of the parts.

That’s a cop-out answer if I ever heard one. Clearly she’s already moved on. With some more concerted pushing and some flipping back and forth of pages hoping to stir some more meaningful reactions, she finally came up with,

I like when all the kids help Henny do stuff and when she shares the lollipops and eats them all at once.

YES! The whole lollipop subplot was just a complete ploy to suck the 5-year-olds in. And it worked! Plus, we talk about sharing, so we win out with the moms and dads in the audience too! What can I say? I’ll pander when my options are weak and few.

Sensing that she might never get out of this obligation, Alden then offered up the following quick summary review:

I give it a thumbs up. A thousand thumbs up. I like your drawings and I like your pictures. Because I like drawing things.

You can already tell that she is someone who susses out the answer that she thinks you’d LIKE to hear, rather than the answer she believes herself. Hopefully she will grow out of it, but I’m afraid she comes by it honestly (via Matthew).

On the other hand, we’ve got Kato, who takes a dramatically different approach. He says exactly what he thinks.

Kato’s Review:

I don’t like it. I want to play Mario Kart.

That was it. The end. No more review.

Not to be defeated, we returned to the book the next day and I tried again to get some commentary as we were reading the book. That kind of backfired because on every page he said, “I don’t like it when [insert description of what’s happening on that particular page of the book here].

Until, surprisingly, we got to this page, in which Henny hatches a plan:

Kato suddenly said,

I like when she has a secret place.

Perhaps he was feeling like he would very much like to escape to a secret place and not have to answer any more questions. The next page, however, excited him even more.

He sprang up and declared,

I love the fighting part because it’s amazing how they’re fighting so hard! I think Henny’s going to win because she’s so brave.

Again, I think perhaps he felt some kinship with Henny in that he had a strong desire to wrestle me to submission for making him answer all these questions about this book. I started to feel a little concerned that he might toss me over his shoulder like Henny tossed her opponent in the ring. So I very gently asked him one more question: Thumbs up or thumbs down, Kato?

Thumbs down. It’s too boring. Because I don’t like firemans because the alarm goes so loud.

Though we cleverly included the lollipops to win our audience over, we did not take into account their biases against fire alarms when turning Henny into a heroic fireman at the end. You can be sure that our next book will include lots of lollies and wrestling and no references to firemen.

And so, in sum: Henny Wampum Had a Really Big Head receives one thumb up and one thumb down from Kidskel and Weebert.

Tune in in two weeks when we’ll review a book that we didn’t write.

Also: if you’d like to purchase Henny Wampum because you want to spread the gospel of sharing lollies, saving cats, or wrestling your opponents with a smile on your face, you can buy the book from us here.