"An enjoyable picture book about the dangers of “being a sheep” and encouragement to keep hold of the things that make you happy."
A colourful picture book about being a sheep. Bob and his friends all have blue umbrellas to help keep them dry when it rains. When all his friends decide the red umbrellas are better, Bob doesn’t want to change, and his friends fall out with him. On one particularly wet day the sheep realise the red umbrellas aren’t as expected, will Bob be able to help them get dry? Leah Ingledew’s The Umbrella Dilemma is a quick entertaining picture book with a number of important messages. It highlights the importance of not just following the crowd for the sake of it, like Bob when he wanted to keep his blue umbrella instead of being like all the other sheep who switch to the matching red ones. The story also ends with the suggestion to “question everything”, not to take things at face value and follow the crowd but consider the bigger picture and who has your best interests at heart. The endpapers with sheep in the rain with their own variations of blue umbrella are really cute and I can foresee younger readers taking a moment to look through the differences and choosing their favourites. The illustrations throughout are colourful and give ever increasing hints as to who is behind the faulty umbrellas for readers to pick up on. I also liked that all the blue umbrellas are all slightly different but all the red umbrellas were identical, highlighting again the importance of identity, marching to the beat of your own drum, having shared likes that can be similar, but don’t have to be the same. I think the illustrations and the text work well together, there’s not a lot of text, sometimes letting the illustrations do the work to describe the scene with bits of speech from Bob and his friends which I think utilises both aspects of the book. By doing this the youngest readers who are following the pictures can still be actively involved in telling the story, and it creates space for discussion about what’s happening on each page. An enjoyable picture book about the dangers of “being a sheep” and encouragement to keep hold of the things that make you happy.
Charlotte Walker, A LoveReading4Kids Ambassador
| Primary Genre | Indie Author Books |
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