Polo: The Runaway Book by Regis Faller

Polo: The Runaway Book by Regis Faller

Rating: 5 (is 6 possible?) stars

All right, regarding me wanting to add a sixth star, there are definitely some better children's books out there--this is not our for-all-time, no-joke-about-it favorite book ever.  BUT the creativity in this book just knocks my socks off!  I'm really, really impressed and just am thankful that my kids and their budding imaginations can be inspired by this Regis Faller guy.

In case you're reading this from some warm place, it's been cold here in the US.  Really cold.  Northern Virginia usually has mild winters with 2 or 3 snowstorms that provide 3-8 inches with each storm.  And you can almost always count on a few random warm "relief" days during each winter month.

This year?  Not so much.  Today was the second day we reached 50 degrees since early December.  It has been C-O-L-D.  And then, last week, we got 8 inches of snow dumped on us.  School closed for three days, then we had a weekend, followed by two teacher workdays. That's SEVEN days home, in a row.  With temps so low it was tough to go out for longer than 15 minutes.  Add to that a case of pink eye (Lorelei) and strep butt (Ben).  Yes, you read that right.  Who knew it could appear in a place other than your throat?  Well, now you know.


Polo reads his book, before it gets snatched away!

 But we survived.  Thanks to the 47 books we checked out from the library the night before the snow fell!  We almost hit our 50 book limit!

What books do you want in your house, on your shelf, when you're snowed in?  This is actually a fun and useful question to me these days, in a nerdy sort of way of course.  And, getting back to the book I'm supposed to be writing about, this book is THE BOOK you want.  Actually, next time you see your local weather people ringing the alarm bells on a storm, just order up all of Regis Faller's books so you have them.  They are all wordless and so interesting--sometimes touching on Alice in Wonderland bizarre--and kids can "read" them by themselves.  About once a day, Lorelei would spend 5-10 minutes with this big book on her lap, following Polo with her finger, sometimes telling the story out loud to herself, or to one of the big sleeping weimaraners next to her.

Here's the thing about all the Polo books--they are all great, but this one and The Adventures of Polo are the longest by far--maybe three times the length of the others--so they make the best purchases if you're going to buy one for yourself or as a gift.

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...