Funny. I was going to hold off blogging about Press Here because I didn’t have a lot to say – mostly because I couldn’t decide whether I loved it or thought it was stupid. I figured I’d toss it off to Elly (she’s 13) and see what she thought.
She loved it. She did it all. Every single thing. And she said “IT WAS AWESOME, BEST BOOK EVER.”
And still I wasn’t going to blog it yet because, well, I figured it was just a weird Elly thing and maybe the book is stupid.
But just now, RJ, (who is 16, remember), came down to wait for her papers to finish printing and she picked the book up. RJ does not generally give two glances to the children’s books I check out at the library but I sat here and watched her go all the way through it – doing every single thing the book said to do. And as she was doing this, TW walked in and said, “you’re doing it wrong, you have to press down all of the dots at once…”
I looked at her in surprise. TW belittles my reading of children’s picture books ALL. OF. THE. TIME. And yet she had picked that one up, without me mentioning it to her – and she too, went all the way through the book and just said, (sheepishly), it’s kind of cool.
So. I guess it’s not stupid?
It isn’t stupid. It is magic. It reminds you that there are ways you interact with books that change the book. It reminds you that you have power when reading. It reminds you that authors have to remember that part–they don’t tell the story for themselves, but for other people and those other people have a bit of say. It reminds you that before there were all sorts of touchscreen gadgets, a page was the first touch screen. It sort of is like the monster at the end of the book, but you aren’t a fan of that book.