''Mas Mas Mas'', Dijo el Bebe: 3 Historias de Amor (More More More, Said the Baby Book

I know that Vera B. Williams' More More More Said the Baby won a Caldecott Honour Medal, but personally, I just do not like either the text or the accompanying illustrations all that much (I guess can to a certain point appreciate both effort and sentiment, but the end product of More More More Said the Baby feels rather majorly lacking to and for me). Yes, the illustrations are definitely bright, colourful and full of joyful movement, but frankly, I find some of them weird, creepy and strange in nature. And while I would not necessarily call them inappropriate, especially the picture of the father repeatedly kissing his little boy on his exposed belly button leaves a rather strange taste in my mouth, as does the depiction of the grandmother "tasting" Little Pumpkin's toes (now don't get me wrong, I actually do not think there is anything wrong with these behaviours themselves, but the visuals, the pictures of said actions, feel a bit uncanny and potentially disturbing, at least for me).

The accompanying narrative of More More More Said the Baby reads sweetly and humorously, but also often rather tediously, with an unnatural and painfully awkward lyricism (and is actually also kind of hard to read at times, as it seems to blend right into the illustrations, somewhat reducing reading ease, especially if one requires reading glasses or has even minor issues with visual contrast). And while I personally have no major (no huge) issues and complaints regarding the fact that the text is presented by Vera B. Williams in what one would and should likely label as colloquial American slang, many of the most negative, critical reviews of More More More Said the Baby quite take umbrage at the fact that proper grammatical forms are at times lacking (and although I consider this criticism more than a bit extreme and over the top, I also do believe that the slangy discourse of More More More Said the Baby is part of the reason, the text, the printed words do have the tendency to feel forced and awkward in places).

Now even with my issues and criticisms of More More More Said the Baby, I actually much appreciate that Vera B. Williams has depicted an ethnically diverse set of babies, and that the second baby, Little Pumpkin, while clearly African American, obviously has a Caucasian grandmother, a fact brilliantly shown by and with the illustrations, but not in any way ever textually belaboured or extensively analysed; it is simply presented as natural, as a given. And I truly find it more than a bit sad that there are actually quite a number of critical (ranting) reviews on especially Amazon that appear both shocked and rabidly angrily aghast at the fact that Little Pumpkin is African American while his or her grandmother is not (and some of these so-called reviews could sadly be straight out of a National Socialist guidebook on "racial purity"). Two and a half stars if half stars were possible for More More More Said the Baby, rounded up to three stars for effort and for the fact that multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism are so naturally and lovingly depicted!