The only thing wrong about this book is that it wasn’t around when my children were growing up.
With truly delightful artwork by Mike DeSantis, author Vanita Oelschlager offers up some silly examples of dangling participles: a deer on a skateboard; a girl blowing away in the wind; a girl melting while eating ice cream, and so on. It’s sure to make youngsters smile and giggle while teaching them a valuable lesson about the English language.
It’s the sort of book that, had I had this when my children were growing up, we would have read it, laughed, and then spent time making up our own dangling participles to try to get each other to laugh some more.
What prevents me from giving this a full five stars is that some of the correct sentences (after reading the sentence with the dangling participle, we get a correct sentence) are very clumsy. For instance… the dangling participle sentence reads:
“Melting in the hot sun, Ida rushed to finish her ice cream.”
And of course there’s a picture of a girl melting into the sidewalk.
But the correct version reads:
“Melting in the hot sun, the ice cream had to be finished quickly by Ida.”
Isn’t it a less clumsy sentence to say:
“The ice cream had to be finished quickly by Ida before it melted in the hot sun” or “The ice cream had to be finished quickly by Ida because it was melting in the hot sun”?
All in all, a good book for children.
Looking for a good book? Don’t Dangle Your Participle by Vanita Oelschlager is just what a good picture book ought to be … fun to read and educational.
I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.
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Don’t Dangle Your Participle
author: Vanita Oelschlager
artist: Mike DeSantis
publisher: Vanita Books
ISBN: 1938164032
paperback, 22 pages