Penny Feels Good and Happy by Sherri Hardey; Illustrated by Zoe Laverne

“Penny Feels Good and Happy has a great message for staying healthy and exercising.”

Review by Rayleigh Setser

Chester is enrolled in Captain Grey-Fogg’s pirate school and, by hook or by crook, is determined to become a pirate! After picking out a first mate, Chester begins week-long classes in the art of piracy. Things don’t ever seem to go right for Chester in any of his pirate classes. Will he even earn the coveted pirate eye-patch? At the end of the week, he gets an unexpected surprise when one of his mishaps changes everything. Pirate-lovers of all ages arrrrgh sure to enjoy reading about Chester’s misadventures!

I received this book for free from the author/publisher. All comments and opinions are entirely my own and this review is voluntary.

Penny Feels Good and Happy has a great message for staying healthy and exercising. This is an important message to teach kids and I applaud the author for being so passionate about her goals to teach with stories. However, I do believe that the book could've used a round of editing. There are lots of grammar mistakes that made reading it feel very choppy. A professional editor would've improved the reading experience marginally.

The pictures are cute, but there is very little diversity, which makes the experience sort of bland for a kid's book. The words take up most of the pages and there is a lot of reading. I know my younger siblings would not have sat through this book without more pictures. Plus, there were several mistakes. The pictures look as if they were digitally produced and in two of the pictures the penguin is missing its beak! That's kind of an important feature if you ask me, and the result looked quite odd.

The "chapters" end very abruptly, as well. I'm not sure why the story was even divided into chapters because of how small it is, though I suppose the author may have intended the book to be used as an early-reader book. But, if that is the case, I wouldn't recommend this book because of the poor grammar.

Overall, I feel like this book was thrown together with very little care for the quality. It would've been a very cute book, and I liked the story and the bright colors of the pictures, but I would be disappointed if I had spent money on this book. I hope the author takes better care in producing higher quality books in the future, kids deserve good books too!