Review: Oops! A Diaper David Book

By: David Shannon

The Blue Sky Press; 2005; unpaged

Board Book

Ages: 6 mos - 2 years

ISBN: 0-439-68882-5

Popular character David is a baby in the author's series of board books. In Oops! readers learn David's first words such as eat, ball, and dog. The accompanying illustrations are depict a mischievous and impish infant in a lively and colorful manner.

My Thoughts:

I did not particularly care for this board book. The text is simple, uses terms that the babies are familiar with, and is appropriate for vocabulary building. However, the artwork, while colorful, is too messy for my taste. Also, the attempts at humor were neither constructive nor clever.

My main concern was with the actual situations used to illustrate the text. Call me old-fashioned, but I do not want to encourage children to misbehave. "Ball" shows David breaking a window. "Eat" shows him with partially chewed food in his mouth. "Dog" shows David's upturned lunch all over the family pet. I understand that babies and toddlers make mistakes, and that accidents are something that they can relate to. David doesn't seem to feel remorse...they are shown in a purposeful manner. I think that the topic can be covered in a way that does not glorify the problem. (Uh-Oh, Calico comes to mind.)

David is depicted as such a brat that the "heartwarming" picture for Mama is no longer believable or touching...the reader just feels relief on Mama's behalf that she finally gets a short break!

Thoughts of Others:

I found, literally, no critical reviews of this work. This leads me to think that perhaps board books are not very high on reviewers' priority lists. I did find some reader reviews on various websites. A lot of them were positive, although some readers agreed with me that the book encourages bad behavior, or was merely extremely annoying to them as adults. Oh well, to each his own.