| Tails | 
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| Author: Matthew Van Fleet
Publisher: Red Wagon Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $13.94 (100%)
New (44) Used (96) Collectible (3) from $0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  48 reviews
Sales Rank: 2751
Media: Board book
Reading Level: Baby-Preschool
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 20
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.9 x 1.4
ISBN: 0152167730
EAN: 9780152167738
ASIN: 0152167730
Publication Date: October 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: With pride from Motor City. All books guaranteed. Best Service, best prices.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
The most fascinating part of an animal, in the minds of many young children, is the tail. Not only do kids lack such appendages, they've been told that, as tempting as they are to yank on, tails are not to be touched. Fortunately, this charming, texture-rich board book (with patches of real fake fur!) is the next best thing. A vast menagerie of cartoonish critters play and scamper around the pages of Matthew Van Fleet's Tails sporting tails of all types: bumpy alligator tails, fuzzy tiger tails, and even slightly stinky scratch-and-sniff skunk tails. Children can pull the tabs to make some of the tails wag or swish. The story line is minimal, as animals lounge about playing with one another and generally having good-natured fun. Catchy rhyming verse ("Tails fluffy, tails stringy, scaled tails strong and clingy. Tails long. Tails stumpy, pulling tails makes snoozers grumpy") keeps the action moving along and encourages young readers eager to turn the page. Shoddy construction can often spell doom for lift-the-flap and touch-and-feel children's books but Tails is every bit as well-designed as it is well-written and illustrated. (Preschool) --John Moe
Product Description
Tails are irresistible to toddlers--though most are beyond the reach of small hands. But now there's reason for tail fans everywhere to rejoice: a colorful collection of tails created just for those eager toddlers to tug, pat, and even scratch and sniff!
Matthew Van Fleet's lovable menagerie features furry tails, spiny tails, shiny tails, and tails that wag--all designed to inspire and withstand hours of interactive play. While pulling tabs and opening gatefolds, those tail tuggers can also learn to count from one to ten. Tails is so full of action and fun that even parents will revel in repeated readings.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 43 more reviews...
 "Finger-tickling fun for toddlers"...crushing tedium for their parents July 20, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
A well-meaning friend gave us this book, along with a bunch of others, and all I can say is that the other ones were infinitely better. It's true that our little girl (less than 2) is pretty keen on the book, but within a matter of months she had ripped out the waggling tails and I had grown very, very tired of the artist's limited repertoire of facial expressions, jokes, limp rhymes and cutesy-cuddly anthropomorphic animals. A sign of how much it compels our own toddler is that by now, she is only interested in the (admittedly mildly impressive) peacock. Elsewhere, you too will get bored and irritated by the sheer repetitiveness of it all, not to mention the actually kind of nauseating smell of the scratch & sniff skunk's tail.
There are a number of other books for very small kids that I would recommend more than this one. Judith Kerr's 'The Tiger Who Came To Tea', for example, is a truly strange and mysterious story that our girl returns to over and over again. 'Tails', however, is a one-joke book which tries to be educational but which is meanwhile relentlessly inaccurate from a zoological point of view - if you're going to show something about animals that doesn't actually feature them as characters, you could at least show them behaving in something like the ways they really behave, instead of having lions cheerfully hanging out with porcupines. Avoid.
Excellent diction, hilarious pictures, fun for adults June 14, 2008
Disclaimer: my wife used to work for the publisher (we
got it free along with every other new release). This
was by far the most fun of any of them. We bought several
extra copies for gifts to friends.
Great book to read to pre-readers. Too many complex and unusual
words for learning to read. The pull out fun (and wagging tails)
are made of many layers of cardboard, so it lasts a lot longer
than most active books.
lots of fun May 10, 2008
Bought this for our 15-month old--he loves all the different textures and turned the nice big pages. And mom & dad learned about new animals too (pangolin??). However, I think he is a little young for it because he pulled out some of the tabs that make the tails move--they are sturdy enough we can repair it, but we may put the book away for awhile until he's a bit older.
Great interactive book May 7, 2008
We got this as a gift for my 18 month old daughter and she absolutely loves it. The design is extremely sturdy, which is great, because with all the use it gets, it needs to be. Some books have tabs that make parts of the book "move", but after repeated use, they tear and the moving parts don't work anymore. Not a worry with this book. It has held up great. The textures that are used for the touch and feel items are perfect, the drawings are adorable, and the fact that the author uses animals not typically chosen for children at this age is an added bonus. Forget your run-of-the-mill cats, dogs, and lions, your child will encounter boars, porcupines, weasels, chipmunks, pangolins, and tamarins. (Yes, I will admit, I never heard of the last two animals until I read this book--even a parent can learn something from it!) Matthew van Fleet added a nice touch to the book by including pictures of the animals in the back that you saw throughout the story, along with their names, so kids can learn about animals that they were probably not exposed to prior this. A GREAT interactive book for curious little minds! You will not be disappointed.
Fun Book March 19, 2008
I first learned about this book a few years ago when I was babysitting a friends child. I thought it was cute then. Since then, I have had a little boy of my own, who is now almost a year old, and he really likes this book. He really seems fascinated by all the things this book does! He doesn't usually sit still to read books, but this keeps his attention. I also just purchased the book "Dog" by Matthew Van Fleet. That is a birthday gift for my son, but my husband and I both think that its a cute/humorous book. (anything that isn't annoying for me to read repeatedly is a huge plus!) I am now very interested in other books by this author, and excited to purchase a few more by him! Can't wait for the new "Alphabet" book to come out!!
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