Help! A Story of Friendship
We liked the moral of this story; it is about friendship and what true friendship means. However, because it is a book for little ones, we have a caveat or two about the story. I would not read this to my little one until my little one is an older little one. There is a decent amount of fear in the story and we hate having my little one feel fear before it is necessary or a normal part of development. Part of it is because the characters are all animals, with the main two being a snake and a mouse. Snakes, for a long time, just by seeing one in a story induced some fear and while we feel that is a normal human (little one) reaction, as mentioned earlier, we avoid putting unnecessary cortisol in my little one’s brain. Additionally, a big part of the story is mouse falls in a hole and cannot get out, which is also scary to some little ones.
We also did not find the illustrations to draw us in, to create an emotional connection to the characters and story. Because of all of that, we almost put this in the skip category, but there really is enough kindness and redemption in the way mouse eventually treats his friendship with snake that it is worth a read.
Cautions: There is fear in this story, fear with the snake, fear with mouse being hurt in an accident.
