The Moon Might Be Milk

After a rough streak of mean-spirited picture books we came across this simple treasure, "The Moon Might Be Milk" by Lisa Shulman and illustrated by Will Hillenbrand. The story follows a little girl named Rosie as she tries to learn what material makes up the moon. Along the way, animals make suggestions (e.g. the cat thinks it is milk, the hen thinks it is an egg). By the book's end, include all of the ingredients necessary to make "Gran's Sugar Cookie Moons," which Rosie and her grandmother enjoy together. The story's simplicity isn't a negative. In fact, it makes a nice change of pace for my two sons (ages 6 and 4), who love picture books and stranger stories like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. In summary, this book is a wonderful bedtime story. The recipe at the end of the book is a nice bonus.

Some of the phrases are awkward and there is a bit of stilted sentence structure... I like my preschoolers books to be well written grammatically and I actually amend a couple sentences when I read it to my 2.5year old... that being said, he loves this book. It's been one of his top requests for the past 2 weeks. The illustrations are simple and colorful, and I do like the cute recipe included... we will be making these cookies soon. Three Star Update: tried the recipe and it is not very good at all... surprised and disappointed... going to have to use another sugar cookie recipe in place of the one in the book, which is a shame bc part of the fun was reading the illustrated recipe at the end of the book.

Lisa Shulman has come up with another wonderful book to read to your children or students. The illustrations are very good, colorful and suit the story. My children are older now, but they liked the story and my daughter wants to include it in her babysitting fun-box. I liked the fact that I was surprised by the grandmother turning everyone's idea of what the moon was made of into ingredients for a cookie and I especially liked having the recipe at the end. I found myself thinking about my grandmother, she would have loved this book. She always had freshly made cookies for our visits; if she'd had a book like this, she would have incorporated it into our family traditions, calling sugar cookies "moon cookies," pointing to a fingernail moon and asking "who took a bite out of the moon?" This book reminded me how much fun it is to cook with your children--an activity which has the added bonus of eating the end result. The only negative about this book? Now every time I see a full moon I get a craving for cookies.