ivplay's Full Review: Matt Mitter and Jon Goode - Seymour Sea Turtle Sna...
Seymour Sea Turtle Snaps Up Lunch is a new book that we found while on vacation to New Orleans. We were walking through the Aquarium of the America’s looking for age-appropriate gifts for our three boys when my wife spied this book, along with others from the same series. The series is called Snappy Fun Books, which I will explain below. The book looked interesting and was nicely illustrated, so we decided that for $4.99 it was a good deal…
Storyline
Seymour Sea Turtle Snaps Up Lunch is a story of a young sea turtle who is bored eating the same old sea sponges everyday. He sets out to watch other sea creatures eating and try out their cuisine. The book shows parrotfish eating coral, eagle rays eating shellfish, humpback whales eating up krill, and a shark hunting for dinner, which Seymour fits to a Tee! In the end, Seymour determines that the sponges are A-OK and goes home to have his favorite dish, sponge cake!
The text in the book is simple in nature, easy for a three year old to understand. The book has twelve pages total with approximately 10-20 words per page. The book itself is a board book of medium page thickness and is approximately 5 inches by 4 inches, without the head.
The true appeal of this book is the head, which is a plastic protrusion off of the top of the book in the shape of a turtle head. The head is hinged at the jaw and allows the child to snap along to the story! Each page has several “SNAPS” in the text, and the premise is that the child can snap the head along with Seymour. The other books in the series have a similar snapping head to snap along as well! This may be hard to visualize, and Epinions does not have a picture of the book itself. If you follow the link below, you will see a picture of the book and hopefully this helps you to understand what I may not be portraying in words so well!
The book is illustrated by Jon Goode, not authored by him as the Details section above intimates. The colors are vibrant and the illustrations are very well done, brining out detail of the sea animals in question very well. The underlying colors are blue and tan, as this book is staged under the ocean surface with blue water and sandy bottoms. The animals are given happy faces, except for the shark, of course, making the illustrations very kid-friendly!
Our Experiences
Our Boys received this book and Alex Alligator and His Fearsome Jaws (soon to be reviewed here as well) at the same time, as soon as we got back from New Orleans. Immediately the three year old saw the potential in this gift and began chasing his almost-2-year-old brother around trying to SNAP, SNAP, SNAP him! This is one of the hazards of having boys, I am told!
After reading through the book, my wife and I enjoy the story as it seems to point to the fact that you can be content with your situation. Seymour is looking for something more exciting than Sponges to eat, but by the end he realizes that sponges are his favorite, regardless of whether he eats them all the time! The boys really enjoy reading this book and snapping along, although it took some coaching to get them to understand that when we said “Snap”, that was their cue. Now that they understand this, we are very happy to have two of the books so they do not fight over who gets to snap Seymour! One gets to snap Seymour while the other gets Alex, and all are happy!
The snapping mechanism appears to be fairly well affixed to the book, although I do not think it will be with us for years and years. At some point in the future the snapping mechanism will probably break, and we will be left with a headless book. The boys do like the story though, and I assume that we will still read the books at that time.
Necessary facts:
Seymour Sea Turtle Snaps Up Lunch was written by Matt Mitter and illustrated by Jon Goode, as metioned earlier. The book was published by Reader’s Digest Children’s Books in 2002 according to the back binding. This surprised me, as the epinions details page states that it is published by Simon & Schuster in 2003. Perhaps it was bought out and reprinted?
ISBN: 0-7944-0124-4
I hope this review has helped you in your purchase decision, and any ratings or comments are thoroughly appreciated!
This new title in this unique interactive snappy series allow young readers to, with the press of a finger, open and snap shut Seymour Sea Turtle s ja...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.