Bubble Trouble Book

Now even though upon commencing with Margaret Mahy's Bubble Trouble, I was indeed smiling and very much enjoying both the fantastically hilarious premise of a little baby stuck in a large bubble and floating away and the humorously engaging, songlike rhymes (although I have to say that occasionally, the cadence and rhythm of Mahy's featured verses do have the annoying tendency to turn and feel a wee bit frustratingly uneven), sorry, but really, the actual featured storyline of Bubble Trouble, it just seems to go on and on for much too long, and yes, by the end of Bubble Trouble, I was actually getting both quite massively bored and thus also more than mildly peeved (especially since I also have not really aesthetically enjoyed Polly Dunbar's accompanying illustrations all that much either and have indeed even found that their garish gaudiness actually often seems to majorly distract me from the author's, from Margaret Mahy's verses, and so much so that I more than once have had to actually force myself to refocus my eyes back onto the actual text, back onto the verses themselves). Still an entertainingly engaging enough little interlude is Bubble Trouble (and likely because of the rollicking poetry, with ample plays on words and fun alliterations a perfect choice for a read aloud, although my ageing eyes do rather wish that the font size had been a trifle larger and the letters a bit thicker in circumference). But truly and sadly, from a total and complete personal reading pleasure point of departure and view, I have definitely found Bubble Trouble a bit ho-hum and much too tediously drawn out (and therefore, its Boston Globe Horn Book Award notwithstanding, for me, three stars is the absolute maximum I am willing to consider for Bubble Trouble).