Parents' Guide to Aggie and Ben: Three Stories

The stories here aren't the most exciting ever written, but they're engrossing enough to keep a child reading, and they have flashes of humor and depth.

Writing books for beginning readers is tricky. The intellectual and interest levels of young readers usually exceed their reading abilities, and crafting a story that's interesting to them -- while sticking to a very strictly confined vocabulary set -- is a challenge few have mastered.

What sets the book apart from others of this type are the illustrations and the way they work cleverly with the text. The pictures -- pen-and-ink with watercolor -- are humorously stylized and more sophisticated than those in most I-Can-Read books. They bear close and repeat viewings, as faces and bodies express ideas only hinted at by the text (the boredom of the pet shopkeeper, the father's reaction as his son considers a snake, etc.).