The Adventures of Polo by Regis Faller

The Adventures of Polo by Regis Faller

Rating: 4.5 wordless stars

We've stumbled into the world of Polo, an adventurous French pup whose imagination takes him to some pretty neat places.  I'm not a huge fan of wordless books...I once checked out a bunch because I read an article saying that it was The Thing To Do with 3-ish-year-olds, but I just wasn't into them.  Neither was Lorelei, so it was an easy genre of books to not check out again.

But we ordered this book, not realizing it was a wordless book until we got it home.  I'm so glad we made this mistake!  Lorelei sat and "read" it for ten to fifteen minutes when we first got home from the library.  She could easily follow along little canine Polo's adventures: laughing when he slid down a line and plopped onto a cloud, gasping in surprise as Polo sees what he thinks is a giant fish from inside a submarine, and wondering out loud what Polo was going to do on the next page.  The illustrations are charming and funny, full of slap-stick type humor that toddlers totally get.

The only negative thing is Polo's run-in with a polar bear.  He and his new friend of the feline variety find an igloo on top an iceberg with a scary polar bear inside.  The polar bear frightens them with his silent roar (this part is actually one of Lorelei's favorites) and the cat and Polo look scared.  But then the polar bear slips and falls off his iceberg and splashes into the cold water below.  That's not so bad, but Regis Faller adds a little picture of Polo and the cat laughing.  Boo.

But I can't end on a bad note.  I overlooked that not-so-great part and added my own words (the beauty of a wordless book): "Glad that he was ok after that fall!"  There are lots of things to love about this book: I love how Polo meets all different types of animals along his not-so-straight path from his tree house and back again.  He had a little imaginative adventure with each, waves good-bye, and sets off on his way, alone, until he pops into someone new.  I actually think it's a sweet message about friendship--how some friends stay a long time in your life and other friends just come for a short while and disappear into the woodwork. 

I also wonder if this book is a little gift to parents--it's a book children can "read" to themselves, after all, so maybe I'll check out a few more of the Polo books so I can get through The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest a little bit faster...