Toofer & The Giblet
by Paulette LeBlanc
My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Children’s fiction
Toofer and The Giblet are mice that live in a tree in Nimblewood. The Giblet is adventurous and doesn’t always think things through, while Toofer is more serious and thoughtful. This book is a collection of vignettes of their lives—often trouble The Giblet gets into that Toofer helps him out of and lessons learned along the way. The end of the very first story brought a heart-warming “awww” moment for me and set the stage for the rest of the book. Each story includes an illustration, and the pictures are beautiful additions to the stories. There’s also a map of Nimblewood, though at least in the Kindle version, it’s in the back of the book, which is an odd place for it. If I were reading this to a child, I’d definitely want to know the map is there from the beginning so we could look at it as we meet the other inhabitants of Nimblewood.
Not all of the stories are quite as sweet as that first one, and some have little lessons while others just seem like silly fun (like a monkey taking The Giblet on a ride and only being stopped by the offer of peanut butter). Though the chapters are individual stories, they do build on each other in a way that makes the reading all the more enjoyable. I can easily imagine reading 1 chapter at a time at bedtime to/with young children (depending on their reading level) and being able to point back to references to past stories. The overall tale told is one of friendship and adventure that is well-suited to early readers, or even kids younger than that if the book is read to them.
(Some parents might appreciate knowing that there is a reference to a frog being “hopped up on pond juice,” which seemed to me to be a mild reference to inebriation, and I know some parents don’t like that kind of thing being included in books for younger children.)
Find out more about Toofer & The Giblet
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
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