Thursday, April 11, 2013

Dirty Gert by Tedd Arnold - OPTIONAL


Arnold, Tedd Dirty Gert, PICTURE BOOK. Holiday House, 2013.  $16.95. Content: G. 

Gert has grown up loving everything about dirt.  She particularly loves to eat it. The dirt energizes her and the more she eats the more she becomes a plant.  The science and entertainment communities attempt to benefit from Gert’s photosynthetic condition, but it ends up making her ill.  Her parents take her back home and treat her with the best in plant care and she recovers nicely.  

The rhyming in this book is expectedly well done (Tedd Arnold), but I just didn’t get the point.  It was a little weird at first (which I actually loved) because of Gert’s affinity for eating dirt, but I felt like there wasn’t much purpose for her condition, reasoning behind the sequence of events, or strong conclusion to the story.  The worms that adore Gert are pretty cute and I was so hopeful that the story would be so weird it was endearing, but I just wasn’t convinced.  

Pre K, El (K-3) – OPTIONAL.  Reviewed by: Shay, School Librarian

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