Bringing Down the Moon; Jody's Beans; Last Noo-Noo, The; Max

The idea of this series is to make available these well-liked picture book titles in a more ‘compact, manageable format’ so as to broaden the opportunities for parents and children to read favourite stories, as the blurb says. A laudable goal, one can’t deny and this format would certainly fit more easily into a bag than the original formats that come in varying sizes, making it more manageable to take the book along when you have to be out – sitting in a hospital waiting room for instance. The size and format of a children’s story book are part and parcel of its unique identity, so there is bound to be something lost in making it part of a uniform set. On the other hand, these particular titles seem to have been quite successfully transposed to a more compact size and some children love collecting ‘sets’ of books, so one must on the whole applaud this new series of titles from Walker. UC