Baby librarian Tilly and her mum Jen review the picture book Go, Girls, Go! by Frances Gilbert, illustrated by Allison Black.
Tilly reviews Go, Girls, Go!
I love this book. This is a fun book to read aloud and even I can read aloud the book now, especially on the ‘go girls go!’ pages. I like all the different vehicles in the book. My favourite is one that isn’t actually being driven by any of the girls — my favourite is the blue broken car that’s being towed by the tow truck. I also like the word ‘Go’ on the page after the ambulance because it has two bandaids on it and owies and broken things and bandaids are some of the things I have a keen interest in right now. So a pretty great book! I give it 4.5 stars; would have been a full 5 if there were more broken things with owies in it.
Jen reviews Go, Girls, Go!
Honestly, I don’t love this book. I like the colourful and bright illustrations, and the rhyming prose is good for reading aloud, but I had two criticisms of the book, both of which seem minor (and really, they aren’t a huge deal), but I found they took away from my enjoyment of the book. The first is the layout. The text seemed to be a bit scattered and I didn’t think my eyes were naturally led to where the words were, and there was effort required in seeing what was supposed to be read aloud. And my second issue, which to me was the bigger problem, is that I think some of the vehicles made the wrong noises. The noises could have been a really fun read-aloud components of the book, but I thought it was ruined by the fact that the sounds didn’t match the vehicles. Vehicles with sirens should make siren noises, but instead the fire engine goes vroom and the ambulance goes wooo. What is the ambulance, a cheerleader? They should be going whee-ooo whee-ooo! And instead of going vroom (probably because the fire engine wrongly stole the vroom), the motorbike goes roar. Lions roar, not motorbikes! And this book would lead you to believe that trains hoot, but every other kids’ book would agree that owls hoot and trains go choo choo. So, you know. A perfectly fine book that we will keep in our collection for now because Tilly likes it, but one that I will be mildly dismayed by every time I read it aloud to her.