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Review of ‘Ummie Tink’ by Katharine Valentino
Great kids’ book with a clever approach to incorporating a coloring book with the main text
★★★★★
Author Katharine Valentino has found a fantastic way to update a long-lost children’s book.
Her book, Ummie Tink (available at Amazon), is a modern update on a chapter from a 1913 children’s book. The original book, called The Cheer Chirpers, by Joshua Freeman Crowell, was read to the author by her grandmother when she was a young girl.
The story reads like you’d expect from a children’s tale, with rhymes sprinkled into the narrative in ways that do wonders for the flow of the story. For example:
— “I must rest a moment,” she said. With a flop and a drop, she came to a stop — at the pink petal portal of an apple blossom.” —
The rhymes remind me a little of Shel Silverstein, but not in a copycat kind of way (it can’t be a copycat, of course, since it was originally written in 1913!), and not dark like Silverstein can be. Quite the opposite: This is a cheery, empowering, positive little book with phrases that will delight young readers.
The author adds a coloring book after the end of the story that features black and white versions for coloring that…
