I Got This Hat – Jol and Kate Temple and Jon Foye (book review)

After last fortnight’s trip down memory lane, I’m back into my new goody bag of books. We had a spending spree at Australia Post recently, where the value of the book packs was just too good to walk past.

Here’s a new (to us) book that we’ve quickly grown to love.

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I Got This Hat / Jol and Kate Temple and Jon Foye

(ABC Books, 2013)

We got this book. We read this book. We adore this book.

I Got This Hat is perfect for our family at the moment. I’ve read it a few times to our four-and-a-half-year-old, and now she’s taken over the reading to our almost-two-year-old. She loves reading it (including the occasional tough word), and he loves hearing it. They both love miming putting the hats on their heads. Win-win.

It’s a great example of a simple idea and repetition used cleverly to create solid children’s book gold. Two things should annoy me – some (many) of the rhymes don’t quite rhyme, and the sentences are free of punctuation but strangely flit in and out of title case – but somehow, they don’t.

The book is clever and fun, and inspires you to create your own hats. (By you, I mean the kids. And maybe you. But not me. Craft doesn’t like me.)

And while illustrations are important to all picture books, to this one they’re imperative. Without the illustrations, there is no book. I love me a book where the words and pictures interact in deceptively simple brilliance. (After all, it’s what put Orange Pear Apple Bear on our family favourites list.)

I Got This Hat is a winner for kids of all ages. Recommended for ages born and up. You can buy I Got This Hat from Booktopia here (currently 55% off!) or from Book Depository here. Or you can try your luck at your local Australia Post shop, where we picked it up together with three other titles for $14.95.

 

Have you read I Got This Hat? What did you think?

* Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you click to buy the item, I earn a little commission but you don’t pay any extra.