Recently I was contacted about a series of books called The Quirkles and if I would be interested in reviewing the books. I, being the book lover I am along with my enjoyment of science, said “Of course!”. My review books arrived several days later. In my box were Timothy Tornado and Zany Science Zeke.

My first impression was one of surprise. The format of the books is large which makes them easy to use with multiple children. As a paperback they have a more sturdy feel than some you will find both in the cover stock used as well as the internal paper weight that has been chosen. This is important to me as our well loved books must stand up to multiple readings. The boys were drawn to the books at first because they were new. To get a better idea of their actual interest I let them sit for a bit before bringing them out for a read.

There are several things we loved about these two books. One of which was the easy experiments that are in the back of each story. Both of my boys recognized immediately that there were things TO DO after the story. The series starts each book with the same first paragraphs. This is nice because you can pick it up at any letter and not be missing on the backstory. Also I’ve found it creates a signal that the story is coming. At least that is how it works with our Stephen Cosgrove books. The illustrations also made the boys’ “thumbs up” list. Little things like Tammy Turtle popping into her shell when scared would be noticed and exclaimed upon. The text was large which made it easy to have my Jr. read a bit or in some cases catch something that was coming up in the story.

Reading them blind was a bit of a challenge. I had not taken the time to pre-read the stories and thus my reading was done without practice or familiarity. While I enjoyed the reinforcement of the associated letter…Timothy Tornado nearly unhinged my tongue in certain places with all the “T” words in one sentence. According to the boys that is also a “thumbs up” as tongue-tying Mama is funny. The stories themselves were cute though I do take issue with the “bully becomes best friend of person he’s mean too” line that is employed in the Zany Science Zeke book. It fell very flat for me personally and was a little more than annoying. The boys did not seem to catch that so perhaps with smaller children it doesn’t matter as much. And in the Timothy Tornado story there is what I consider a “missed edit” where the words read as is makes clumsy sense. Though that didn’t affect the quality of the story much as it was easy to read over with a “fix” instead of what was written.

Even with those two strikes this series would make my read list for the simple reason that my kids enjoyed them and grabbed the books out tonight to re-read through what we needed for one of the experiments. And though my 7 year old sat through the stories it was my 4 year old that they really grabbed. So many of our phonics readers are lacking in anything but phonics. It was nice to have some science mixed in with our “T” and “Z” books.

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