Mercy Watson Goes for a Ride
This book is for more advanced readers or older little ones. It’s longer, with chapters.
The book is extremely well written for a kid’s book. I can see why the author of the book won a Newberry Award, just not for this book. The conversations are natural, realistic. There is no simple, repetitive nature to the book that a lot of books for early readers has. (I tend to call that simple, repetitive writing the “see dick run” style.) The story also has some clever writing within it, subtle jokes that only an adult would catch (clean and funny jokes). One of the better written books we’ve read.
Without any scientific backing, we think that this style of writing is much better for early readers. It’s a bit more complex and a bit more natural, and we tend to give little ones a lot more credit for understanding language and interactions at a young age than a lot of people do. Especially if a parent reads to their child!
The images in the book are really fun, a lot of color, motion, energy, and emotion. They are more sparse than a lot of books, but that is also common for chapter books versus the books for little little ones.
Because the story is a description of the day in the life of Mercy Watson, and there is no deeper meaning here, it did not make the favorite list. But that is not to say that this is not an entertaining book!
At this time there are six books in the series though this is the only one that we’ve read so far.
Cautions: There is a very crabby older woman who doesn’t behave or talk like I want my little one to. Mercy Watson is also naughty in this story, jumping into the driver’s seat while the car is driving down the street, though in a goofy funny way - but still very dangerous if a child would be able to get out of a car seat restraint (at a still very young age mine can…). I would not want my little one to learn these behaviors from this story. The counter to the cautions is that by the time a little one can hold focus for this story, he or she should be able to understand with some explanation by a parent or reader that there are some behaviors that we do not duplicate.
