I've had this blog for a while now, and one thing I've never done is rate a book one star. It's hard for a book to get just one star. Think about all the different axes a book could be good on: the story, the illustrations, the purpose or moral of the book, the kid engagement, the readability. All books that eventually make it to the printer do at least average on one of these axes, and when a book does average on one of them, it's hard to give it an outright one. Digging through my kids' shelf, I had a hard time even coming up with a single book that would get a two out of five. Partly because we're not keeping around books that are any worse than that. If a book's a two out of five, it's not coming off the shelf, the shelf's already crowded, and it's probably time for it to go. That's usually the biggest hurdle, since my kids never want to get rid of anything. If they're willing to get rid of a book, you know it must not be a very good book.
But there is one book that I'm going to call a one out of five. It might be unfair, because it's not a book the kids want to get rid of. It's just a book that makes me a little bit mad. I've already written a blog post about books that don't make sense and just make me upset reading them, and in that post I covered all the potential reasons for this. Maybe it's laziness on the part of the publisher, picking some IP and churning out slop knowing kids and parents will buy it. Maybe, and I did give these books some credit, they make more sense to a child's brain than I give them credit for. But that would require a lot of imagination, a lot of filling in the blanks, and if you're totally reliant on a kid's imagination to put your book together and make it make sense, it's probably not quite enough. I called out A PJ Masks Treasury specifically in that post as a book that, start to finish, just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Now, this is one of those collections of storybooks. Think about all those five-minute storybooks that litter your local Target, covering all of the major IPs. They have the Paw Patrols and the Batmans, but really, name the characters your kids like and I'm sure there's some five-minute book that's been printed for them. This isn't an indictment on all of those books. We have at least 10 of them, and not all of them are bad. There's some I honestly enjoy; maybe one day I'll pull out the Batman five-minute collection we own, which comes out all the time, partly because my son loves Batman and partly because I like reading it. But there is a range, and at the very, very, very bottom of the range is the PJ Masks Treasury.
Six stories, and I can't explain any of them
Reference Moth thinking "Noooo not this one again!"
The main reason this is a one out of five is that there are six stories in it, ranging from complete nonsensical mess to "hey, there's probably a couple pages missing." There's one called Meet Carly and Cartoka, about two aliens who come and try to steal car parts for their alien land, and then some mystical monsters get summoned somehow. That one makes no sense.
Then we get PJ Masks Save the Sleepover, where Luna Girl is trying to crash Amaya's party. It starts off as a story that somewhat makes sense, Luna feels bad about not getting invited and tries to crash, but then everything falls completely apart when this random character, Motsuki, comes and crashes the party crashing. Honestly, trying to explain these is already making my head get scrambled.
"Who?"
Story three is Race for the Ring, where the three PJ Masks decide to look for Night Ninja, who is on some mountain looking for something for some reason, and something happens, and the power of friendship comes through, and somehow... I'm flipping through it now and I'm honestly baffled about what's even going on.
"How?"
In Wheels of a Hero the PJ Masks are trying to figure out who stole the Gekko-Mobile, and they think it's Armadylan, but it's actually the Night Ninjas, and Armadylan decides not to be a bad guy and through the power of teamwork they get it back somehow.
"What?"
Then there's Owlette and the Giving Owl, where Owlette brings something to show-and-tell and her friends try to convince her to give away the Giving Owl. Is this a thing? Having something explicitly for the sake of giving it? I've said "I don't know" a million times here because honestly, I don't know.
And at the end we get Super Cat Speed, where there's a concert Connor is supposed to play at but he's nervous, and then the Night Ninjas crash the party for some reason they don't really explain, and Catboy stops them, and then he realizes he can be brave, and they have a great concert.
"Why?"
My kids were never that obsessed with PJ Masks, and I certainly didn't watch it, so I don't know if these are episodes or not. I'm guessing they are. Most of these five-minute books want to be as efficient as possible, so they take some episode that was presumably around 20 minutes and condense it down, and in order to make it work they have to strip out a lot of the story. You're left with this bare-bones thing that touches the characters, the general problem, and the resolution, but when you take out everything in between, you don't understand the why of anything that's happening, or the what, or the how. Every single one of these stories, I find myself in my head saying over and over: what, what, what was that, how did that happen? Then I'll flip back a page assuming I skipped one, and my kids will just blankly look at the book, then look at me, like "I don't think you skipped a page, Dad." When the story finishes, it just ends on a question mark. Okay, moving on to the next one, I guess. It doesn't have to be like this. We have Bluey books that follow the exact same formula based on an episode, and they put care into them making sense, so they still carry the original essence of the story. I think it probably took as much work to condense a TV episode down into 10 pages as it would have taken to just fill up 10 pages with a short story that makes sense in book form.
Level one, ready to read, except it isn't
A book that's easy to read has words a kid who's learning to read should be expected to know. Let me just read you a page I honestly picked at random: "There is a bright flash! The Cat-Car and Flashcar jump into Zoomzania." On that single page there's a couple words you'd expect: there, is, a, the, maybe jump, maybe into. But there's a lot of words that are going to straight up trip up a kid learning to read, and they're not even beneficial words. Sure, it would be nice to teach them "bright," but Cat-Car, Flashcar, Zoomzania? Those are made-up words. If I were to have my kids read this book, I would have to help them on every single sentence. I think they got caught up thinking fewer words means easier to read, and that's not true. Part of it is fewer words, but there's a lot of other parts: sentence structure, sentences that are basic in flow and don't make you think they're ending when they're not. This book has a lot of awkward sentences, a lot of nonsensical made-up words, a lot of quotations when somebody's talking, the things that more advanced readers become able to do but aren't for level one. This is not a Biscuit book, where 90% of the words are ones a beginner should be focusing on, with one or two stretch words per book. So even on the easy-to-read piece, it's a one out of five.
One of the first sight words kids are taught these days is "Zoomzania".
The illustrations are screen grabs
I've read some pretty bad books that end up having at least decent or great graphics. I might call out The Rainbow Fish here, which I haven't reviewed yet, and I will, because I have thoughts on that one. For all of that story's faults, the one thing you can't fault the book for is fantastic, beautiful illustrations. You can't give it one out of five even if you absolutely hated the story, because you have to say, "oh, but those shining scales glitter on the pages." Here we're not even given unique illustrations. We're given straight-up screen grabs from somebody who was probably watching the episode on a computer. They do a decent job at least taking a screen grab that seems to summarize whatever's on the page, but there's nothing original about it. Usually the best book illustrations are built around the text, adding context, designed to go hand in hand. Here it's the opposite: they wrote down the skeleton of the story and then went looking for a screenshot closest to what the words say. It's not that I dislike the art style of PJ Masks, it's relatively cute and they do a good job not going uncanny valley with the CGI, but it's definitely not standout. And when it's not standout and not original, there's nothing holding the book any higher than where it should be. So we have bad stories in all six of the books, and bad illustrations in all of them.
How it actually goes at our house
I don't like reading books that don't make sense. I find it very awkward to read, since it seems to keep missing pages and the flow is not great, and I think the kids can hear the confusion in my voice while I'm reading it. Do we read it sometimes? Yes. Will I ever pick it off the shelf? No. Will the kids pull it off the shelf sometimes? Yes, and that's because we own other PJ Masks books that aren't part of a story collection, more standalone and at least slightly better, and sometimes after one of those the kids are feeling the PJ Masks and walk over and pull off the Treasury. I never say no to a book. We read it, they get my confusion, and it goes back on the shelf until next time. Our copy also came with stickers, which from Bookish Dad and Bookish Mom's perspective is a negative one out of five, because those are getting stuck somewhere we don't want. Side note: they're stuck on the bed right now, I see them every night, I want to remove them, but I know there will be a meltdown, so they're there, at least for now. And on the message front, the Giving Owl story has Luna Girl really wanting the thing, and at the end they somehow justify that she should just get it, even though she's evil and even though Amaya doesn't want to give it away. She's guilted into it. That's not dissimilar from the Sleepover story either.
So why do I still own this book? The reason I haven't answered is that I'm not sure. Maybe this review is going to be the straw that broke the camel's back, and maybe it doesn't make its way back up to the bookshelf after I'm done with it here. I'll leave that up for you to decide. I talk a lot about my favorite books on this site, the Dad's Picks, the very best of the best, but I wanted to touch on the other end of the spectrum too, because in my opinion, those are all the pieces that make a children's book bad.
