The Birthday Book: Stickers to Stick and Cards to Create for Every Month of the Year

Andrew Vaisius is a Winnipeg daycare director.

The rationale for making this type of book escapes me. It’s a
hardcover book with a hefty price, and very little to offer a child.
“Stickers to Stick & Cards to Create for Every Month of the Year” it
joyfully trumpets on the front cover, but this fanfare quickly fades
when the reader realizes that this translates into 12 birthday-card
craft variations (cut here this time; cut there the next) and 60
use-them-once stickers. The pictures are quaint, but again they are
simply a variation on one theme: five chubby-faced kids ready to party.
As a bonus—or is it an appendix?—the book also lists the birth
flowers and birthstones for each month, the number of days each month
has, and three well-known, albeit appropriate, rhymes.

This is not a book to read over and over, and hardly what I think would
be a handy birthday reference. One couldn’t pin it to the wall—more
likely one would have to nail it there. I wonder, since Greey de Pencier
Books is a licenced user of the trademarks of the Young Naturalists
Foundation (see OWL magazine, a fine publication), why the publishers
would lend their approval to the slaughter of trees for pulp to produce
this book. At best this material warrants a very inexpensive paperback
edition with 100 percent recycled post-consumer paper.