Review - Fancy Nancy: Nancy Makes Her Mark

Fancy Nancy: Nancy Makes Her Mark (Fancy Nancy)
adapted by Nancy Parent
illustrated by the Disney Storybook Art Team
Date: 2018
Publisher: HarperCollins
Reading level: C
Book type: picture book
Pages: 32
Format: e-book
Source: library

When Dad makes a plan to fix the walkway in front of their house with new cement, Nancy knows just how to make the walkway parfait--which is French for perfect!

Disney Junior's Fancy Nancy: Nancy Makes Her Mark is a Level One I Can Read, perfect for children learning to sound out words and sentences.

Disney Junior's Fancy Nancy is an animated family comedy starring six-year-old Nancy, a girl who is fancy in everything from her advanced vocabulary to her creative, elaborate attire. The show is based on the New York Times bestselling book series Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

Here's a fancy word that describes this book: "unnecessary". I'm not much of a fan of tie-ins, but I was curious. This book lacks pretty much all of the charm of the original Fancy Nancy books and relies instead on an insipid plot and cartoonish illustrations to try to cash in.

The story here is basically that Nancy's dad is fixing the walkway with cement, and Nancy and her friend Bree want to put their handprints and footprints in the wet cement like celebrities. Of course, nothing goes according to plan, and the cement gets wrecked, necessitating a fix from the dad (who seems weirdly okay with having to redo the whole thing).

All the familiar characters are here, and while they're cute, they're not as interesting to look at as in the main series of books. Nancy and Bree are nowhere near as fancy; they usually have copious amounts of butterflies or flowers in their hair, but here they're curiously unadorned. Aside from the lacklustre plot (which I've already mentioned), there were only three "fancy" words, and the definitions that were given were questionable for two of them: "memorable" doesn't really mean "famous forever" and "devastated" is not the same as "disappointed" (if it were, then I'd be "devastated" by this book).

Skip this and go to the originals. Fancy Nancy is at her best when she's quirky and fun. This is just too slick and sanitized for my taste.

Premise: 2/5
Meter: n/a
Writing: 2/5
Illustrations: 3/5
Originality: 3/5

Enjoyment: 2/5

Overall: 2.33 out of 5