A low-rent road to quick inner serenity with drifty Japanese-style flute music to speed the way.
Invisible to his mother but plain to see most of the time in Ross’ amateurishly painted domestic scenes, a monkey embodies young Jeremy Jones’ restless thoughts and physical clumsiness. It causes trouble for Jeremy until his mother plays a “calming audio story” (actually hypnotic rhymed directions for focusing on breath control, presented separately on the scanty app’s 10th and final page) at bedtime. One hearing enables Jeremy to show the monkey to the door the next morning and to keep it distant thereafter with quiet activities. Neither scattered rhymes and part rhymes nor the audio narrator’s increasingly deliberate and breathy reading enhance the brief prose main text. Along with stiff, poorly placed animations in most scenes, a touch anywhere brings forth a bizarre spurt of green and purple leaves. Readers who make it to the end of the app are unlikely to be inspired to follow the link to plunk down more money on the printed book.
Far short of zen-sational. (iPad therapeutic app. 6-8)
