to really dislike it when picture books are just wrong?

[mousyfledermaus]

for example "a squash and a squeeze" the house from the outside does not match (windows/doors) the inside.
not to mention funny proportions.

Yay! someone else who feels the same about 'suqash and a squeeze'! I can die happpy....

stellanova- not all children were evacuated.

"astonding said the gruffalo"

Really? Astonding!!!!!

my dad can spot mistakes in school history books by the make of the car. (eg thats not x date because that car wasn't built until x +1 date)

I think the animals in good night gorilla are all babies as they all have toys. i have had rather too much time to contemplate this whilst "reading" it to ds every single night for several months.

I've recently got a copy of Julie's Jungle which states "Julie follows the monkey's through the jungle". I have alerted the apostrophe police.

I am also upset at the presence of lions and zebras in a jungle.

A cow cannot be a "he" grrrrrr

Not a book but sponge bob square pants and his camp fires under the sea make my teeth itch

Fiction books are just that - fiction. Anyone who knows the inside of a Victorian two up two down terraced house will recognise Coronation Street houses. The interior does not match what the outside suggests.

attheendoftheday (great name, by the way) I'm with you on the inappropriate animal habitats. Reminds me of a friend of mine (who's African) who gets incensed about lions in jungles, tigers with lions, Africa being one amorphous 'country' and so on. In our house, lions and zebras live firmly on the savannah, and tigers are strictly Asian .

puddlejumper I'm glad you mentioned Bear Hunt, because I've always been puzzled by the relationship between the protagonists. Is the bloke the father or a much older brother? And is the oldest female a wife or a daughter? She looks too old to be his daughter, but too young to be his wife. And if she's the daughter, then where's the wife? (I know, I shouldn't be so conventional, it could be a single father household, but it's just always troubled me.)

YANBU. Agree with it's NOT A COCOON!!!!! Grrrrr! On the Eric Carle website he does admit that he is wrong but he used it because 'cocoon' sounded better

I HATE books designed for small children that HaVe tEXt LikE tHiS. Yes, Cahrlie and Lola, I'm looking at YOU! How does that help a child learning to read to enjoy the book?

My mum complained to the publisher of the Miffy books once when I was little because the text said that the door of Miffy's house was re, but in the picture it was clearly orange. They wrote back and said that on their colour scale, the door was red. Fine if you're an illustrator using Paint

Apologies for the capitals. I get a bit irate about this sort of nonsense

*Charlie and Lola

Good thing I don't write children's books...

the door of Miffy's house was *red

Harrumph!

Well it COULD be a cocoon- but then the caterpillar would turn into a moth, not a butterfly!

Nothing to do with pictures or errors, but similar to the farmer/ladybird comments...
DH has an almost irresistible urge to modify the text to "The Duck in the Truck" you know, with the incessant rhyme when duck's truck gets stuck in the muck...now what should the duck say??
Thankfully he's never read the modified version to a child, but I now can't read it to my class with a straight face and a terror it accidentally slipping in there..

So many mistakes in 'Mog and the Baby'...

Why is Nicky being kept home from school when he only has a cold, but is clearly well enough to look after a baby and walk into town?
Why is the baby referred to as it? The baby is walking, so clearly over a year old. Has nobody checked between the legs, and maybe given the baby a name? And why is baby delivered with bare feet, when it is cold outside (everyone wearing coats)?
Why are there so many dogs just wandering about in the streets by themselves?
What kind of stupid cat lets themselves be dressed in a bonnet and pushed around town in a dolls pram? And what sort of 6(?) year old boy would humiliate himself by pushing said cat and pram in public?
Who gives a cat a whole fish, including head, tail, bones etc. to eat?
Why is nobody wearing seatbelts in the car?
Why, when she returns, is Mrs Clutterbuck not incredibly pissed off with Mrs Thomas for failing to look after her baby to the extent that he/she is almost run over by a car, but instead purchases a fish as a reward for the cat (who lured the baby into danger in the first place) without even entering the fish shop?

Can you tell I have to read this sodding annoying book nearly every day?

Thank you for this thread. I feel normal now.

(Just spent a couple of years mentally telling myself off for being pedantic and nitpicking every time I spotted an inconsistency in a child's book)

Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a BLUE HORSE looking at me? WTF? There are no blue horses in real life, all the other animals are real animals. This annoys me.

Also, the way that most picture books have the fantasy nuclear white middle class straight 1950s mummy stays at home family by default, and the ones that don't are the exceptions and are making a point of it, like 'Mummy Goes To Work'.

My DD's favourite at the moment is "Where's my Teddy" - Jez Alborough.

Except for "they ran and they ran through the dark wood, back to their homes as quick as they could".

Surely it's quickLY?

I have very almost emailed the publisher about this

Ha ha, Hogwarts, I HATE Mog and the Baby for the same reasons. And I don't even have the book, only the spoken word CD, so I haven't even seen the dodgy bare feet issues. Luckily DS1 hates it too (indoctrination? surely not...) so we always skip over it.

I am positively outraged, outraged I tell you, at the utter irresponsibility of "Dear Zoo". Imagine giving every small child who wrote to the zoo a vast collection of totally unsuitable animals. What's a 1 year old going to do with a lion?!

joyfulpuddlejumper- there are London buses, so I assume it's London. (I also think the father is off to do his shift on air raid watch, not back off to the front as others have suggested (previous threads)).

We also have sadness at the last page of Bear Hunt...

I think the chap is father to some of the children, and the others are their cousins, and the 2 women (sisters) have gone out for the day together, and probably won't be too pleased when they come home and see what they all got up to!

Dinosaurs/Aliens Underpants I agree the rhymes are so clanky and ill fitting I rework them as I read (and its not hard to do so which makes me wonder if it's intentional).

Mog and the Baby - yes to all of the above - Mrs Clutterbuck should be FURIOUS that her baby was wandering out of the house into the road. But then she does look like she's stressed to the max on drop off so maybe her grip on reality is a little shaky through sleep deprivation.