The Squirrel, The Worm, and The Nut Trees Review

When a pesky worm starts to destroy the crop of nuts, anyone in the neighborhood who wanted these nuts must come up with a quick solution to the problem. In this book, The Squirrel, the Worm, and the Nut Trees, a concerned male squirrel must do exactly that: Find a way to outsmart an annoying worm in order to get the necessary food to feed his family.  

Book Commentary:

The Squirrel, the Worm, and the Nut Trees is a book about finding solutions. A worm is ruining the nut crop and threatens to continue. A male squirrel must find a way to save the nuts so he can feed his family. The squirrel could become confrontational, but he decides first to be diplomatic and when that doesn't work, he talks with his wife to work out a solution to the problem.

This book is all about pre- planning and working toward a solution to a problem and this is fine and good. But there are many faults that prevent this from being a good children's book. Among them, the problem that is most glaring is the use of bad grammar. Statements like "I love to rotten the nuts with my silk webs" and "Mr. Squirrel and his family had to stretch the nuts they had found, so that they would last a longtime" are just two examples. Unless the dictionary has recently changed, I am pretty sure "rotten" is not a verb and I'm also pretty sure "longtime" is two words. Some simple editing would have easily resolved these problems and others like them.

Another problem I have with The Squirrel, The Worm, and the Nut Trees is the story itself. There isn't any real "moral" to the story, except, I suppose, that planning ahead is a good way to solve a problem. There is also very little creativity. Here you have two characters named, of all things, "Mr. Squirrel" and "Mr. Worm". Certainly the author could have thought of something more creative than that. The solution to the problem presented in the book is also rather lame. Mr. Squirrel's brilliant plan to stop the worm is that he will gather nuts earlier in the year. Considering this book is aimed at elementary school children between the ages of 9 and 12, this story is a little too simplistic. Something more unique or creative would have made the story much better.

Is there anything redeeming about The Squirrel, the Worm, and the Nut Trees? I can think of exactly one thing: The illustrations. They look like they were taken directly from a television cartoon and they offer many cute drawings of the squirrels, worms, trees, and surrounding forest terrain. Most everything is either brown or green, so the illustrations are not particularly colorful. But they are realistic, and there is enough visual enjoyment that children will not pay much attention to the story.

Bottom Line Viewpoint:

Overall, The Squirrel, the Worm, and the Nut Trees isn't the best children's book I have read and it doesn't even rank in the top half.  It lacks originality, uses bad grammar, and doesn't offer a very strong or complete message (the book ends with the worm unable to figure out what happened). The illustrations are nice, but they are not enough to rescue this book from mediocrity. The book isn't much, but it will do in a pinch when the younger children have nothing else to do and want some fun pictures to view.