Seek and Find National Parks Board book – Download: Adobe Reader, April 11, 2017

I really wanted to like this book. What a great concept to do a seek and find in our national parks to get kids excited about upcoming trips! Yet as I flipped through the pages, I was very quickly struck by how similar the dozens and dozens of people on each page looked. You have to get 4 national parks into the book before you see a person with a skin color other than peachy/pale. Even then, folks with darker skin seem to have hair textures and eye colors that aren't likely the right fit.Is that being picky? Maybe. But I don't think it's a big ask for a book that has hundreds of people drawn into its pages to have a more accurate and diverse representation of what makes America great: it's people!

While I liked the concept (a find it book about national parks), this was a disappointing book. Why?1. As you flip through the pages, you realize that all the pages basically look the same.2. There is almost zero educational content - the opportunity to show unique things about each park is completely missed. All the characters are the basically the same on each page, and with few exceptions (hey, there's a river in this park!) so is the background imagery.3. While there are tons of characters and animals in the books, all the depicted interactions are nonsensical and unimaginative. They feel very pasted-in and not thought out. Here, we'll put a racoon fishing, next to a fox and a moose.And perhaps the only aspect of this review that matters - while our toddler loves find-it books from Disney and others, she doesn't engage with this book and seems disinterested whenever we've shown it to her. It's going back.

Got from library. We love the parks and this had such potential for a great book! But it’s the opposite of educational or even remotely representative of the parks or the US. There are nonsensical animals that don’t exist, orca whales in the Rocky Mountains, and essentially no sense of any given park’s special features. No information at all. Most disturbingly, every page is cluttered with trash and people who are almost (and often 100%) exclusively white. The drawings are copy-pasted from one page to the next as well.This could have been done so well. Hope someone makes a real seek and find for the National Parks.