I heard loud giggles from the backseat of our car. My nine and eleven year old children were bonding over a book that they kept passing back-and-forth between themselves as we were driving around town. They were making small illustrations and were passing the book back-and-forth between each other as the ideas flowed and as they continued to read along with the book. Soon, they had completed all their illustrations and sat down to read their book to their little siblings. What was the book that caused all the fun and sibling bonding? It was Doodle Adventures: The Pursuit of the Pesky Pizza Pirate!

In this book, children are allowed to do something we’re always telling them not to do.  They are allowed (in fact, they are required) to draw into the pages of the book. As they begin this book, they are drawn into a mission. This mission is to help a duck named Carl the Duck to figure out who is stealing all the pizza and pizza ingredients in town. They read the book, look at the illustrations, and are prompted to create drawings based on the prompts on the pages to complete the story. The funnier and more detailed the drawing, the better the finished story turns out.

The book itself is full of elementary and middle grade appropriate silliness. The child who is reading the book follows along with Carl the Duck as his investigative partner. They have to draw boats, disguises, large robots, things that are stinky and more!  The book is easily completed, and fun for the children to go back and re-read later.

As a mom, this is something that was a really nice extra for my children to have, but I would not go into it expecting a great story or something that you will be interested in working through with your child. As my nine year old put it, “There was not a lot of plot to this book, but it was really fun to read and draw”. She normally hates to read and avoids anything that I assign her or think will be fun; so this was a big win in our house. My children also quickly noticed that this was book two in the Doodle Adventures series, so they have been asking me to buy book one ever since, and I can imagine that I will buy many more books in this series as they are written and released.

-Product review by Rebecca Ray, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, April, 2017