The two latest board books to arrive are both based around material from somewhere else.

It’s Hockey Time, Franklin takes the storybook of the same name by Jason Cooper and Scott Jeralds and reformats it as a board book shaped around the image of a hockey puck.  The formatting is a cute effort, but it makes the actual pages seem weird, with text often put into curved space, and with the picture looking like you’re staring at it through binoculars. The story is, well, this is really more story than a baord book should hold, too much text to the number of images. In the AAUGH Blogger’s humble opinion, board books should not have b-stories.

Snoopy’s Family Dinner takes a story from The Snoopy Show and gives it board book treatment. Snoopy wants to hold a family dinner, sends out messages to all his siblings, but in the meantime ends up having dinner with his found family, the kids of the neighborhood. This story fits the format a bit better.

You know what makes a really good basis for a Peanuts board book? A single Sunday strip. This has been done a couple times over the years, to good results.

Ah, forgive me with my crankiness on board books. They’re on my mind, because I just because a great-uncle for the first time, and we’re gathering up the best of the board books from when my kids were kids and passing them on to the newborn. Some of them (most commonly those by Sandra Boynton) are really fine pieces of work, and I’m going to miss knowing that they are still around.  Goodbye, Blue Hat, Green Hat. Farewell, Dinos to Go.

Anyway, if these are the right board books for you, then there they are! And at base, the idea that Franklin got a board book makes me happy.

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