Leonardo: Beautiful Dreamer Book

Wow. This book was seriously long for a picture book. It took us about two weeks of reading a couple of pages each night to slog our way through it.

The positives: There's a ton of great information, wonderful illustrations and a comprehensive look at Leonardo's life as well as of some of his contemporaries. The page on mirror writing was very cool.

The negatives: It's soooo long, with an overwhelming amount of information and at times the font is too small and fancy to be very legible. I know I'm getting old, but I had to get really close to figure out what many of the small quotes said. To exacerbate the problem, the font on the page of mirror writing notes was equally small and backward. I got a headache reading that page alone.

Overall, we really enjoyed reading about Leonardo's life and his myriad interests and studies. I marveled at the illustrations and we spent a long time reading this book. But it is just way too long and it almost felt like a chore to get through by the time we finished it. Needed to be significantly edited in order to be truly readable. Good reference book, perhaps.