Review - Carrot Harvest

Carrot Harvest (Paulina & Charles the Rabbit, Adventures #1)
by Julianna Gally
illustrated by Roman Monti
Date: 2019
Publisher: Julianna Gally
Reading level: C
Book type: picture book
Pages: 65
Format: e-book
Source: NetGalley

This picture book will tell you what might happen if you wake up in a bad mood and don't say “Good morning!”, how important it is to wash your face, and about sharing with friends!
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Paulina is a kind 5-year-old girl. Every day she and her wise best friend Charles the Rabbit have cute and funny affairs, filled with important life lessons and dealing with common childhood issues like family life, building social skills, and making friends. Cute and lovely award-winning pictures will leave both kids and parents smiling and wanting for more! Children's animal action & adventure stories of Paulina and Charles the Rabbit will interest kids of different ages. These books for boys and girls are perfect books for beginners, who are just learning to read.
***
Julianna Gally successfully combines the career of a top manager in a bank and raising children. One day, she decided to write them a whole series of fairy tales, each of them describing life situations that she faced within her family. Julianna has enough love for family to share it all with the whole world through her children's growing up & facts of life books, and their characters.
Paulina and Charles the Rabbit have Adventures! is a brightly-colored and well-illustrated series of board books for ages 1-3, and books for ages 3-5, 6-9. This book is fit for both reading aloud to little kids and for being read by beginner readers.
***
This story is illustrated by Roman Monti, a professional illustrator, animator, and cartoonist was happy to use his experience to bring Julianna Gally's characters and their adventures to life.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This is the sort of self-published book that gives self-publishing a bad name.

The first page--no, actually, the first sentence--contains a comma splice. The writing doesn't get much better from there. There are typos all over the place, as well as formatting issues. It doesn't look like this book was edited at all. The quality of the writing makes what's written in the author bio somewhat laughable:

Kids from 3 to 5 years are waiting impatiently for parents to read them Julianna's stories aloud, while children from 6 to 9 are reading them by themselves, as all her stories are written in a clear, simple, yet good language, making them perfect board books for beginners who will be able to easily understand them.

Got that? Okay... Now, tell me if the following sounds like "clear, simple, yet good language" to you:

Paulina and Charles the Rabbit are the best of friends, they have been for Paulina's entire life and she is already five years old!

(Aside from the comma splice, this is just an awkward sentence.)

Finally, one eye peered opened, then the other, and with great difficulty the head lifted from the pillow.

(Anyone else getting horror-movie vibes? It was just Paulina waking up. I don't know what "one eye peered opened" means, though.)

She sat back down in her chair, propped up her cheek with her little hand and was about to cry when, behind her, she heard Charles's delicately clear his throat.

(Charles's what?)

The story really bothered me, too. It's psychologically manipulative. There's a difference between metaphor and lying, and this book crosses that line. In the first story, children are told that if they wake up in a grumpy mood, their emotions will disrupt the weather and it will get gloomy and rainy. So you're supposed to suck it up, plaster a fake smile on your face, and greet everyone cheerfully. (Lesson #1: Your emotions don't matter.) In the second story, children are told that if they don't wash their face, comb their hair, and change out of their pajamas, their food will run away from them at the breakfast table. This ignores the fact that not every family does things in this order; sometimes kids have breakfast before they get washed and dressed. And that's perfectly okay... except here. (Lesson #2: You must do your morning routine in the order described here or you'll starve.) And in the third story... well, it's not a terrible one, but it has some problems. Charles is trying to move his carrots to storage for the winter. The pile is huge, though, so he offers some to his friends. Paulina is worried by this, fearing he won't have enough for himself. But his friends repay his kindness by bringing him all sorts of treats: jam (which you apparently put in your cup of tea), apples, mushrooms... and smoked sausages. Yes, a rabbit--a known herbivore--is apparently going to eat meat sausages. (Lesson #3: Rabbits are omnivores.)

The illustrations are really strange. When people sit in chairs, they always have their legs crossed. It makes everyone look like posed mannequins. The sizes of the animals are odd; squirrels, hamsters, and mice are as large as a human child. Charles the Rabbit is larger than Paulina's mother. (I don't know about you, but I find rodents larger than adult humans a bit creepy.) There's also something rather static about the pictures, as if the characters in various poses were simply cut and pasted onto the pages; they don't seem to be interacting with each other in a natural way. The formatting is also quite strange. I'm reading a PDF, so what you see is what you get... but many of the illustrations are shifted over to the right (some so far that bits are cut off), and there are issues with paragraph formatting and page layout as well.

This book might appeal to some readers, but it really needs some editing before it goes out into the world. As it is, it looks amateurish and practically screams that it's self-published.

Thank you to NetGalley and Julianna Gally for providing a digital ARC.

Premise: 1/5
Meter: n/a
Writing: 1/5
Illustrations: 2/5
Originality: 2/5

Enjoyment: 0/5

Overall: 1 out of 5