dawnoftheread's review
5.0
What a delightful book! Great introduction to the subject, and really interesting and enthralling art.
antlersantlers's review
4.0
I think I could have lost hours to this book. If I had read it as a kid, I certainly would have. It's about Arvo, a boy who has a cat and is learning to play violin. There isn't much of a story, but there certainly is a lot happening. On every page, wherever Arvo is, the illustrations explore how we classify whatever he's doing. We classify people (family trees), instruments, cats, apples, tools, buildings, and basically everything else. Everything fits somewhere. My favorite pages were about the town where he lives. You first get an aerial view of the town where all the buildings are classified (stores, houses, government, restaurants, performance, etc.), then they are all reclassified based on when they were built. There are so many ways of looking at each picture (at any picture!), and I think this would be a really excellent book for an inquisitive child who likes to seek-and-find, likes sorting, or just likes looking. I really liked it!
backonthealex's review
4.0
At first, a book about sorting and classifying may seem like an odd gift choice, and more like a topic kids might study in school. But once readers open this book, they will meet Arvo and travel with him throughout his day. learning how Arvo and the individual objects he comes into contact with belong to much larger but related groups. For example, Arvo belongs to a whole family tree that goes back generations and includes a diverse number of people. Arvo's cat Malcolm belongs to a large family of all kinds of cats, and Arvo's violin belongs to a whole group of instruments. The book goes on like that, until the end when it circles back to the one-of-a-kind individual. By the end of Arvo's day, readers will definitely appreciate the idea of sorting things as a way to making sense of the world. As the author says, imagine trying to find a library book without the benefit of classifying them. I thought the mixed media illustrations in this oversized book were wonderfully quirky with a kind of old-fashioned feeling to them and spent quite a bit of time exploring them, especially the wide variety of apples Arvo found in the farmers' market until I found my individual favorite, the honeycrisp. This is surely a book that young and old readers will enjoy alone and together.
More...