Don't Let a Spoonbill in the Kitchen product reviews

This book has been a bit of a hit in our house today having read it several times to my son. It is amazing as normally books that are too long and he will lose interest and start turning the pages before I have a chance to read them but with this one he didn't. I really enjoyed the book and got excited about turning the pages to see what bit of advice we would get on each new page. It was definitely a lot of mayhem caused by the various birds in the book.

To be completely honest a lot of the birds I had never heard of before other than the spoonbill and the pelican! The Jacana who I had never heard of before reminded me a lot of a pukeko and I really liked that bird. It was quite cool being introduced to some new birds that we had never heard of before. We like watching the birds we have free range chickens who my son loves to chase, and as we live in the country we have a lot of fantails, and tui's that hang around in our garden so my son already knows about birds and likes to point at them when they fly past.

The book introduces each bird and tells you a little bit about them but not in a non fiction type way in a fun rhyming type way that almost tells more about the birds personality than anything else and then at the bottom of each page it will say something along the lines of but I'll give you a warning that you really should not ignore and when you turn the page you will see a picture full of mayhem. Like if it was don't let a spoonbill in the kitchen, there would be a picture of the spoonbill in the kitchen and the kitchen being in a state of array!! It was marvellous and made you chuckle.

The pictures are great, although they are cartoon style pictures of birds they are really well drawn and look a lot like the different birds actually look like. Some of the pictures are almost like watercolour painting and would look beautiful on the wall of a child's bedroom.

My daughter has a current obsessions with birds. Everything is about birds, from pretending to be one, to putting together snacks of fruit and cereal and peanut butter for the birds around our house. She even recently had a bird themed birthday party. So when I saw this book, I knew it was going to be a huge hit.

I handed her the bag of books KIWIreviews kindly sent to me. I was interested to see which book she would select first. I really should not have been surprised that this was the one that got selected first. I went and put baby to bed and when I came back, she had already poured through each page. I asked her what it was about and she said it was about naughty birds getting into the kitchen and eating all the cupcakes. She was smiling and really excited for me to read the pages to her.

I loved this book and so did my daughter. What I loved about it was that it introduced new bird types to the child. There are some really exotic birds in this book. Some of them took some thinking to pronounce them right, but I really appreciated that my daughter was being exposed to some new bird types and some of her absolute favourites are in here like the Spoonbill and the Pelican.

Many of the illustrations reminded me of the style of Lauren Child, which I actually really like. Its like photo realistic items collaged into swatches of fabric and drawings. I think it's really striking and vibrant. Other pictures in here would just look amazing on my wall, like beautiful pencil and watercolour.

My daughter was rolling around in her bed tonight in hysterics over the birds messy mayhem. Her feet were above her head more often than not. Her favourite pieces were when the pelicans were at the airport, and at the end with a slumber party scene. I must admit that the scene at the shoe shop made me giggle as did one picture of a bird with a bikini top slung around it's torso. Its fictional, but the way the birds interact with the items rings closer to true than make-believe. A wonderful romp for us!