don't hate it the way I do some of my sons' reading material, but I'm also not entirely fond of it, either.
As a standalone book, it leaves much to be desired, There is a presumption of a certain amount of familiarity with the characters and conventions from having watched the television show from which this book is adapted.
On those occasions my sons are granted screen time that's used on cartoons, I tend to utilize theirtominutes of zombie time doing almost anything other than paying attention to the show they're watching.
I feel this is a reasonably safe tactic with PBS, but only slightly lessso than Nick Jr, fodder as found on Netflix as there are no ads to worry about,
Anyhow, I do know that the premise of the Backyardigans is that the characters all have bordering backyards and tend to play with one another, presumably because their own parents are not plugging them into a neverending circuit of television shows and do not restrict their play to scheduled play dates.
In "Mission to Mars," readers get just one page of setup before the characters are suddenly either astronauts or missioncontrol personnel.
Because it's a book for kids, it's not an entirely difficult leap to make, Three of the Backyardigans claim their roles in a "mission to Mars," and one page later IT IS ON!
What
you don't get at this point is a song.
On TV, they're always singing original songs about what they're doing, You can't help but notice and be charmed by this, even if you're not watching, Naturally, there is no singing in the book, I don't know if there'd be a better way to adapt than to just eliminate altogether, but that's what they do,
Note: I bet my word count here already exceeds that of the actual book in question,
The mission in question surrounds a series of "problems" for the astronauts to investigate and resolve, including meteor showers, communication issues, getting lost, and an alien encounter, all in the span of a few pages.
I think this sort of rapidfire conflict and resolution works well for the kids and probably well enough mimics the way kids do makebelieve play, but it's not too compelling for the adult reader, really.
You may think, "So what It's for the kids!" But I can tell you that my own kids do not really crave repeats of this story or other books with the same characters.
There's not much charm or wit to make up for the loss of the musical numbers, What's left just isn't enough to be interesting,
It could be worse, but it could be better, I'd say the best think about the book is that it's short, The kids will likely enjoy it enough with the colorful animation all the characters are different colors, shapes, and sizes, presumably for good societalminded reason and the odd funny declaration, but otherwise, it's a onereadandgetridofit title.
too wordy for the intended audience, The Backyardigans are on a mission, . . to Mars! A strange signal has been coming from the Red Planet, so Pablo, Uniqua, and Austin blast off into space to investigate.
At first all they see are rocks, craters, red soil, and a lake, But they soon discover they're not alone!.