Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Motor Mix: Flight
Illustrator: Rilla Alexander
Novelty Board Book
For ages 3 to 5
Chronicle Books, 2017 ISBN: 978-1452148397
Most children are fascinated by machines that fly through the air. They will happily watch airplanes and helicopters take off and land at an airport for hours on end. They watch space ships zooming across their television screens with wide eyes, and love to hear about how astronauts went to the moon.
In this clever novelty book, children are presented with eight different kinds of flying machines, and for each one we are told how it is moving, the sound it makes, and where it is located. Thus on the first spread we see a picture of a rocket on the left hand page, and on the right hand page sections of text tell us that the rocket is launching into outer space and it is making a “ROAR zoooom” sound as it goes. The right hand page is divided into three tabs, and the reason it is presented in this way is that this format allows young readers to mix things up a little.
For example, when we turn the page we see a blimp drifting above the city and it is making a “whirr-a whirr-a” sound. Now, we can leave this spread as it is, or we can open the tabs on different pages to create our own one-of-a-kind flying machine. A flip here and a flip there and we might end up with a machine that has the rotary blades of a helicopter, the body of a space vessel, and the landing gear of a mini plane.
Using this book children are going to thoroughly enjoy building their own flying machines, and they will surely laugh at some of the bizarre combinations that they create.
