Corduroy's Thanksgiving Book

The board book is only 14 pages long, which was even less than I was expecting. I thought this would be really cute and sweet because I liked Corduroy as a kid and wanted to revisit it. But this wasn't good.

I found it to be really random and it didn't capture the feel of Thanksgiving enough for me. Also, the writing was really odd the way it started talking about Corduroy, relating what he was doing. Then at times it all of a sudden addressed Corduroy directly and it jolted me out of the story, what little there was. It began with Corduroy preparing for his friends to come over for Thanksgiving, so he was setting the table and cooking. But then all of a sudden he goes from being in the kitchen to raking leaves outside, and his friends are there and it said "Welcome!" which was weird, because that was like a line from Corduroy to the friends, and he doesn't have any dialogue because it's in 3rd person from an outside perspective. It just seemed weird for us to be reading Welcome out to the characters...it didn't work for me.

Then they left his house and went to a parade, and the author once again started speaking to Corduroy. "Look at the giant balloon, Corduroy!" Shouldn't you just say "Look at the giant balloon!" to the reader and not speak directly to your character, and have readers reading lines to your character?? And he had 4 friends with him, so it was weird to just direct the line to Corduroy like he's the only character when he isn't.

At dinner they all said what they're thankful for, whatever that turned out to be, because we don't know. It would have been nice to have a page devoted to each character and what they're thankful for. It was so lacking and shallow not to specify.

The food was good, then they played football. "Pass the football, Corduroy!" Again! Ugh.

They had dessert and then "Happy Thanksgiving, Corduroy!"

The format of the writing was terrible to me and the POV was so skewed and odd. Even though they ate, said what they were thankful for, saw a parade and played football, this barely had any feel of Thanksgiving and wasn't deep enough. It needs some more meat and substance. For starters coming up with something the characters can say they're thankful for is nice! And this really shouldn't speak directly to Corduroy like we are talking to him. That is so bizarre and doesn't make for good reading.