Review: I am Blop!

I am Blop! by Hervé Tullet

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



While I was engaged by the variety of concepts and ways of interacting with this simple design, I kept feeling bullied by the text. The text was fully corresponding with what I saw, and telling me how to interpret it. This book has way better potential as a wordless picture book to talk about with young readers as the pages are turned. I wonder what would be a good way to hide the text for a 'read-aloud' that is all kids' repsonses and talk about the visuals.

This would be a much more powerful multi-modal text if the words had been somehow in a counterpoint relationship to the pictures. For example, on the pages where the Blop is suddenly filled with textures of different kinds of animal skins, a question like 'Where is Blop?' would give away none of the answers, but still prompt the same kind of activation of background knowledge. Instead, he simply labeled it "Animal Blop". Boring.

It was too bad, because this book felt a lot like Blexbolex' [b:People|11423979|People|Blexbolex|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1363658140s/11423979.jpg|16357237] visually. But [a:Blexbolex|1256310|Blexbolex|https://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-d9f6a4a5badfda0f69e70cc94d962125.png] was much better at creating a readerly experience and not just a set of concepts to deliver didactically.



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