So when a hand appears in the illustrations, the reading will slap the illustrated hand.

Here’s the lines from one page:Įven if a child is reading the book alone, the story also encourages the reader to high five with the characters from the book. While it’s a really cute idea under normal circumstances, maybe it’s just not the best time to use with a classroom full of kids high fiving. In rhyming text, this picture book is all about how to give the best high fives to win a high fiving competition. What a peculiar book to be reading during the Covid-19 pandemic. The illustrations are done in a bold neon palette colored pencil with a lot of white. The text mostly rhymes with the instruction to “HIGH FIVE” breaking the rhythm and highlighting the command even more. The award for winning the competition (which the reader does) is a trophy at the end of the book that takes up a two-page spread and requires the book to be turned 90 degrees to view properly. The competition begins, and the reader is pitted against a flurry of creatures (a kangaroo joey and its mother, a snake, an octopus), until we are paired with an elephant against whom we had trained. To win the competition, he warns, the reader will need flare. Sensei walks the reader through the best techniques for high fiving. We are first introduced to our trainer, a yeti-ish creature called Sensei with a bunch of trophies on his shelves. This story enters the reader into a high five competition. I think this book would be better one-on-one and one-on-one between a reader and a listening child with whom the reader already has a playful relationship. I had only one little friend who was willing to high five the pages, and I had to do so first the first few times that the book required before he wanted to join in the interactive fun.

I feared that every kid would want to high five the page as required by the story. As a note, I read this first to myself and then to a crowd of children, but always with the idea of reading it to a crowd and dreading reading it to a crowd. I… kind of expected better from the creators of Dragons Love Tacos and Dragons Love Tacos 2. Review originally published on my blog, Nine Pages.

Adam rubin and daniel salmieri