View source for Play With Colours (The Happets) by Laurence Jammes and Marc Clamens

{{infobox2
|title=Play With Colours (The Happets)
|author=Laurence Jammes and Marc Clamens 
|reviewer=Ruth Ng
|genre=For Sharing
|rating=3.5
|buy=Maybe
|borrow=Yes
|isbn=978-1444904079
|pages=12
|publisher=Hodder Children's Books
|date=May 2011
|aznuk=1444904078
|aznus=1444904078
|cover=1444904078
|website=http://www.thehappets.com/
|video=Mz2PURkhbGA
|summary=Touch and feel fun, with cute animals and giving a nice introduction to colours.
}}

The Happets are a friendly looking bunch of animal friends all made of different coloured fabrics.  In this story we're introduced to each character and told about its colour, for example Milo is green like ''gorgeous green apples, gorgeous green clover, gorgeous green balls.''  Each page has a fabric tab, to match the character in question, making it a lovely book for babies to touch and play with.

The nicest thing about this book is the characters.  They all have huge, friendly eyes and sweet smiles so they seem very endearing.  We meet the characters one by one, all of whom are different colours, and they tell us about their favourite colour, listing some other objects that are the same colour as them.  The fabric tabs on each page make up part of the character - sometimes their ear, sometimes their tail, and make a fun way to turn the page and to actually touch and feel what the cuddly looking animals are like.

I liked that the items referred to are perhaps not the first things that spring to mind with a baby's book about colours.  On the brown page we have autumn leaves, chocolate cake and violins!  There's a small image next to each item to show what it looks like and the repetition of each colour helps to reinforce the message for little ones.  The final character introduced is a rainbow coloured bird called Talalo who loves all the colours of his friends, and all the colours in the rainbow.

Although the tabs are nice and colourful, I did feel that they'd missed an opportunity to make them all feel different.  Although one is a sort of knitted fabric, one tweed and one a soft brushed cotton the other three are all just plain cotton and feel the same.  It would have been fun to have something satin and silky, perhaps something with a bumpy texture or with a rustling material inside to make it noisy when you touch it.  This is still a nice book however, with lovely colourful illustrations that I'm sure that young babies will love to look at and 'help' to read.

Older toddlers will enjoy the interactive nature of [[Lulu's Clothes by Camilla Reid and Ailie Busby]] and for little ones everywhere, you simply can't go wrong with [[Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell]].

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[[Category:Laurence Jammes]]
[[Category:Marc Clamens]]