ANDIE PLAYS PRETEND
(reviewed on February 15, 2011)
Andie's playtime at home with her parents is an afternoon of pretending she's a dog, then a cat, then a mouse. But Andie and her parents, who enjoy playing along as she makes believe, get captured in an imaginative spell that never reaches readers. While the choice to present Andie's play literally is fine—rather than take readers into her imagination, the illustrations show her on all fours, puppy-like, or curled up on her mother's lap as a cat might—the story is clumsily presented in other ways. Rather than take advantage of the iPad's ability to enhance through narrative audio or through floating, unobtrusive text, this app instead intersperses illustrations with plain, text-only pages that bog down the story's flow. And one instance, in which a stuffed animal is described as white but illustrated as orange, just seems sloppy. Andie's play looks like fun and is illustrated with calming, earthy colors in line drawings and what appears to be digital finger paint. But it might as well be on paper, completely failing to utilize the iPad's strengths for a story that clearly needs the assistance. (iPad storybook app. 3-6)
