Olive and the Embarrassing Gift

Reviewed by: Carla McAllister - New Gloucester Public Library, New Gloucester, Maine, Choose Library District

Review Date: December 5, 2014

Review

In this third offering in the Olive series, Olive receives a gift from her friend Joe which usually would be a very nice thing, but the gift is a truly ugly hat with Best Friends written across the front. Joe has one nearly exactly like it. Everyone they run into laughs and makes fun of the ugly hats. Oh, what to do, what to do...Olive tries to come up with all kinds of reasons to take the hats off, to no avail. Finally, in desperation, Olive stuffs the hat into a trash barrel and Joe sees her do it! Oh, my. What will happen now? This is a nice story about friendship and to what lengths one might go to preserve one. Also, it will teach children how to accept gestures of friendship gracefully, whether or not the gesture is of great value to them. The illustrations are set against lots of white space and are colorful, appealing and expressive and include Joe the turtle, Ziggy the monkey, Lola the giraffe, and many others. This will make a good addition to picture book shelves everywhere.

Overall Book Score: very good