We recently picked up a copy of Me and Meow by Adam Gudeon from our local library. This was the book our child picked out for herself. It’s a book (not a story) about a child (me) and her cat (Meow). For my cat-loving wife this sounds like a great start, and you might be thinking that for a book where 17% of the words in it are “Meow” that it would be wonderful, but from the very first pages we knew it was a downhill journey. The book is mostly two word sentences and the illustrations are terrible. This book is just plain awful and we cannot stand reading it!

But hey, maybe you like for your children’s books to look like they were illustrated by your young children. Maybe you want your children’s books to have the same vocabulary and sentence structure as your young children. Maybe that helps your kid connect to the book and reading in general. If that’s the case, then maybe you’ll like this book, it has a whopping five 5-star reviews on Amazon so somebody out there likes it.

For the rest of us, you can skip this one. Besides the low quality of the book, the main character, who is either an unsupervised 4-year-old or a retired, 85-year-old, shrunken, cat lady who has forgotten how to speak in full sentences because she has only talked to her cats in the past 63 years, participates in high-risk activities such as wandering the streets alone on her tricycle, scaring her cat, sleeping with her cat, and lighting candles without competent adult supervision. None of these are things I want to teach my child.

I guess the idea of a book about a child’s day from the perspective of the child is not necessarily a bad one, but I cannot stand the way it was executed in this book.

Pros	Cons
Bright and distinct colors	Poorly written
	Poorly illustrated
	I hate this book

Breakdown
Current Price	$12.99
Duration	1:00 – 1:30
Highest syllable word	4 (Storytelling)
Contractions used	2 (where’s, it’s)
Page count	30
Word count	83