Look!

It's kind of gimmicky. I mean, it's an interesting idea to use a hole in the book to frame that outside world but the text of the story is just patronizing. "One day, a curious little kid picked up this book. He looked through the hole and saw all sorts of things." So you can't be a girl, because at the end it says that the curious kid is you, so apparently you're a boy whether you know it or not.

Part of the problem is that the hole is kind of small compared to the book, so if you get get close enough to the hole to see much of anything, you can no longer read the book. And the text is just incredibly basic and not very imaginative. It's only things like looking for different colors, big things, small things, near things, far things, and that sort of thing. There's two pages that are stuck together with Velcro ("things that make noise"), a reflective page ("shiny things"), a soft textured page ("things you'd like to touch"), but most of the pages are black with a very small amount of white text and just this hole in it.

The general concept is interesting but they didn't do anything interesting with it. And I think the book looks stupid from the outside when it's closed because it's got a giant gaping chunk taken out of it. But maybe that's just me. I guess if you're gonna do something like this it's going to look weird because it's an unconventional book. But it's really not that unconventional. References to looking through the hole in the book could just be replaced with "look around the room." There's nothing using the hole in the book that could not be done by saying, "look to your right," and I was hoping for something more imaginative than this. What about images with a hole in them that the reader could use to frame different things in the house? Like, a picture of, I don't know, a cat, but the hole is where the eyes would go, and the text might say, "Look for something that looks like eyes." That would be an interesting way of using a book that was made in this way but this book does not work that way, and frankly I'm disappointed by it.