Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsUnfriendly bees, bad rhymes, too long.
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2020
I agree with the other comments about the rhyming not flowing well. It's not too bad once you get used to it, but starts to go down hill around the part when the bees come. It also rhymes 20 with "plenty" twice and I don't pronounce 20 like that, so I feel weird reading it.
Probably my least favourite part is that the numbers fall out of the tree because bees start attacking them. The bees even go so far as to yell, "GET OUT OF OUR TREE!" Which I find very rude for a 3 yr old's ears. I don't know if these are honey bees, but we generally consider all bees to be friendly. Wasps and hornets are the unfriendly ones. They could have come up with something else to make the numbers fall out of the tree.
My other complaints are that it's just too long and I don't like the way the numbers are sequenced. It counts one through ten and then starts counting by tens until it gets to 90, then it jumps to 99 before the final scene where zero finally gets his home next to 10 and creates a 100. Counting by tens after counting to ten makes sense to an adult, but for someone learning numbers, just piling it all into one book seems confusing. And then to randomly add in 99? I doubt my 3 yr old gets how this is working. I can't remember at what point it start counting backwards too.
The end is cute where zero becomes the "hero", but I don't know why he can't have a home the whole rest of the book. 20, 40, 50, etc. all have zero's where he could have jumped in. It's really repetitive to read "Chicka chicka 123, will there be a place for me?" on every single page and I don't particularly like that he ends up crying either. Made my 3 yr old pretty sad.
I think they were too ambitious with this. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom was one of my childhood favourites and my daughter loves it now too. I gave this one a good chance so we could have a second part including numbers, but I ended up returning it.
