Price Tag: $9.95
Official URL: http://www.harcourtbooks.com
Rating:

Walk On by Marla Frazee is a small book captioned, “A guide to taking the first step.” The cover and dust cover are identical, showing a cartoonish picture of a joyous baby presumably learning to walk. It also has a stamp heralding it as being “Great for grads.”

QUALITY

The book is a standard hard cover children’s book with average quality pages in a flat finish. The text is written in several different fonts, all fairly easy to read and the illustrations are cute drawings of a baby and his various struggles and facial expressions as he learns to walk.

THE STORY

Here is where I think this book falls short. The story gives a baby (or graduate apparently) advice about standing on his own two feet. “Be careful of things that are wobbly. You don’t want anything to fall on top of you.” It tells how to pull up to a standing position, let go and take that first step. How to get back up when you fall, and eventually succeed. Honestly, I just found it kind of boring. I was expecting something along the lines of Dr. Seuss’ Oh, The Places You’ll Go! and really didn’t find it. It reads more like a dry instruction manual for learning to walk, and while there are certainly some parallels to be drawn between the advice in the book and a graduate striking out on his own, there is really nothing profound or awe-inspiring about it. The author dedicated the work to her son leaving for college on the first pages, so maybe that was truly the intended audience. Other than some cute illustrations and heartfelt words of advice for her own child, I’m not too impressed. I give the book 3 stars for effort, and for the cute illustrations.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Stick with the Dr. Seuss classic if you’re looking for a graduation gift with lots of simple but profound advice for the future. If you want a cute, short little book you can read with baby, this might be the choice for you.