Balloon on the Moon Book

Little Rat Rides is one book in the series of Little Rat books. I have to say although I think this book is fairly cute and well written for an easy reader, I did not think it was anything special or worth noting. I would not choose this book to promote in a classroom or read aloud, but I can definitely see it as being a beneficial book to have around a classroom for free reading time practice. I did find it a little odd that throughout this book all the characters were animals, yet some were able to talk and some were not. I also found it odd that although Little Rat enjoyed riding Pee Wee the horse, Little Rat had human like qualities while the horse just acted like a horse. Even though child readers always love animal characters, I think they would find this extremely confusing that some animals in this book could keep other animals as "pets" and have control over them like Little Rat and Mrs. Mugpie have over Pee Wee. I think young readers will love the fact that this book is broken up in to short chapters too. They will feel very accomplished when they complete chapters on their own, and this book easily allows them to do that by having each chapter begin a new short story. Any child that enjoys riding horses or animals at all will like this book very much but I think it is something they will easily grow out of. I personally was not that impressed by the illustrations either, they seems kind of plain and typical to me. I am also not sure how I feel about a rat being chosen as the main character. Rats are not typically a highly thought of or popular animal to begin with. Overall I think this book is a useful tool to use when children are learning to read and will provide some short lived entertainment, but in my opinion it is by no means a classic, memorable piece of children's literature.