THE LITTLE GIRL WHO SNEEZED

A bizarre story about a little girl who reunites townspeople with their brains after an alien invasion.

After sneezing so hard her brain falls out, the unnamed heroine in this odd tale carries her brain around in a plastic bag. How does she function with an empty cranium? Her brain apparently has Bluetooth capabilities; as long as it’s close by, she can still access it (though if it gets too far out of range she suddenly becomes “very stupid”). When aliens land and begin sucking peoples’ brains out, the little girl hides her own brain in her mother’s closet, thus ensuring that she is the only person who doesn’t end up in a zombielike state. She eventually sneaks into the aliens’ spaceship, retrieves all the brains and returns them to their rightful owners. While a few of the scant interactive features are refreshingly simple and mildly engaging (that is, if readers enjoy dumping brains on a conveyer belt and vacuuming them out of peoples’ heads), overall the app is tactually unremarkable. However, the illustrations are bold, crisp and visually appealing, and navigation and functionality are top-notch. Both the music and the annoyingly slow narration can be switched off, but silencing the music unfortunately also silences all sound effects (which is a shame because they add much-needed value to the reading experience). The app will not work on an iPad 1. Unique, but definitely weird. (iPad storybook app. 7-10)