Monkey Nut – Simon Rickerty

Sending a book called Monkey Nut
to a household where someone has a peanut allergy probably isn't the best way to get a good review of something, but then Simon and Schuster weren't to know that.

Unfortunately though this book just didn't quite work for us, even putting all allergies to one side. In this book these two "thing" fight over a single monkey nut before an elephant comes along, breaks it in two, eats then nut and gives them half a shell each to play with. Now the first problem we had was the two "things", one red and one blue. I had absolutely no idea what they were supposed to be and nor it seems did Little Miss C. She asked if they were spiders, but then they didn't have the correct number of legs. A third black one joins the other two, but I was still no wiser as to what there were supposed to be and yet LMC kept asking on every page.

My second problem was with the nut subject. I like the idea of the "things" using their imagination for it to be lots of different things and the conclusion where they were able to share it, but I found myself having to explain to LMC that the nut shell could break and the elephant would just eat the nut inside it. Parents are actively discourage from giving children of her age nuts to eat as they could be a choking hazard so she really struggled to relate to the subject matter.

We originally tried reading this as a bedtime story, but there isn't really a "story" running through the book and hence it wasn't really suited to that time of day. It fared a bit better when we sat down on the sofa with it in the middle of the day, but it just didn't really have a satisfying ending if you know what I mean.

A shame as we enjoyed Simon Rickerty's The Yoga Ogre when we reviewed that last year. It just goes to show that not all books suit everybody.

Disclaimer: We were sent a copy of Monkey Nut to review by Simon and Schuster.