Beautiful Book BUT Disappointed in a Few Things
923732
This is a very well illustrated book with tons of lovely and intricate designs. The quality of the paper is thick with a nice feeling to it. I mostly color with ultra-fine point Sharpie or Bic Mark-It permanent markers, so I was very disappointed to get it home and see that the designs are printed on BOTH sides of the paper --- I know for a fact that my markers will bleed through to the opposite side. So I guess I will have to get out my colored pencils in order to color this book, which I can deal with, but I would MUCH prefer to use my markers. Also, because so many of the designs take up the entire page, they are printed way too close to the binding to be accessible. It's extremely difficult to hold the book open with one hand while trying to color in these intricate, tiny little places virtually inside the spine of the book.

Here's my suggestions to make these coloring books BETTER:
1) Keep the good quality paper but only print the designs on ONE side of each page.
2) This book should be SPIRAL-BOUND. It would allow you to completely open the book up to each page and get into all those tiny spaces near the spine of the book. It would be easier to color as you're not trying to hold it open with one hand and color with the other. I would be willing to spend double the price ($20) for a coloring book of this quality that is spiral-bound.

Overall, I'm glad I was finally able to purchase this book (it was always sold out on previous attempts to order it). However, with my suggested changes, this VERY GOOD coloring book would be FANTASTIC!
775379
This book was disappointing for me. I was assuming it would have much more instruction, ideas, examples, and prayers in it. But it's not very wordy at all. It's small in size, as well as content.

However, one nice thing about it is that the pages are full of nice quality color photos, and there are warming thoughts and touching words sprinkled throughout. On that note, it could possibly make a decent gift to give someone who could use a little inspiration or good wishes in their life. It is a very pretty book. It just lacks the information and content I was hoping for.
4004114
the motifs, embellishments and stitches were great but for the price I felt quite let down with the inside of the book.
it would have been nice to see more.
there have been other books with a lot more work and color  but cheaper than this book
but great cover!  please don't be offended
3526403
This is one of the most beautiful books ever printed and a wonderful introduction to the archive of great Victorian and Edwardian illustrated versions of the classic fairy tales. I was a little disappointed  with the text, however. Tatar's introduction and annotations are insightful enough, if a little sparing, but her translations of the twenty-six fairy tales represented in this volume are surprisingly flat in comparison with the 300 illustrations, many of which are reprinted in full color. It's a pity Tatar didn't use translations from the same period. I know some of these are excessively bowdlerized, but others, such as Lucy Crane's versions from "Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm," are as engaging as the pictures they accompanied. Still, this book is a "must-buy" for anyone interested in fairy tales or the Golden Age of the illustrated picture book. The sumptuous reproductions of "Little Red Riding Hood" and the seven other fairly tale adaptations from the Walter Crane "Toy Book" series alone are worth the cover price.
1601569
This is without a doubt one of the best presented Paleo/SCD recipe books. The pictures are amazing, presentation is top-notch, the recipes are easy to follow, the writing is friendly and relateable. It's really a beautiful book to have in your collection. However, there are a some things glaringly missing, while other are provided in a surprising excess.

The book has no recipes that include rutabaga, turnips, parsnips, radishes, eggplant, cabbage, beets appear once, and much to my surprise, it's extremely thin on greens (Paleo is supposed to be big on green leaves). Sure, there are a few recipes with spinach, salad greens and bok choy, but these are few and in between. Where is kale, collards, beet/turnip/radish, mustard and so many other greens? In other words, this book seems to be utilizing a few, rather "common" ingredients. Sure, you can't include every ingredient possible on a single book, but some of these veggies are important and nutritious-enough (e.g. kale) that should have been allowed a recipe page. Most of these ingredients mentioned are legal under the SCD, and are definitely all legal under Paleo.

The book is rather thin on fish and shellfish recipes too, only including 8. While some faction of Paleo swears on grass-fed beef, there's a newer faction that gives equal importance to wild seafood (and sea vegetables, which are completely missing from the book btw). On top of that, almost everyone knows how to fry a tilapia or sear a salmon, these were unnecessary recipes. But very few know how to do a fish pie (with rutabaga, turnip or parsnip mash for a change, instead of the usual yams/cauliflower/celeriac), or lemon-garlic oysters in butter/ghee. Such recipes would have added more value to the book. Besides, the world is made with more than chicken (which is over-represented), beef, and pork. There's rabbit and game, sheep and goat meat, bird giblets -- all mysteriously missing. As for the biggest Paleo offence: not including a single offal recipe!

Instead, we're fed pages over pages of not-so-healthy baking goods. I don't mind to have some recipes about cookies, a cake, some bread or crackers. We're just humans, so sometimes we want to indulge, or we have a birthday coming up. But when these types of recipes take ~1/3 of the book's pages, I think there's a fundamental problem right there. Especially since the author has her own health problems (like most of us who adopted Paleo/SCD because of health problems rather than just because of targeting weight loss), it becomes all the more important to include more wholesome food made with as much variety as possible, rather than having about 60 variations of almond/coconut flour and honey in various sweets. Instead of using so many pages on sugary recipes, I would have liked more actual food recipes with some of the missing ingredients mentioned above. Hopefully this will be corrected in the Second Edition.

In conclusion: a great looking book, easy recipes to follow for newbies, but the book could have had more variety that would promote to its readers an even better health. Should you buy it? Yes. Should you use it exclusively? No, it's too myopic for the full range that is Paleo. There's a lot more ingredients to explore on a farmer's market and elsewhere.

UPDATE: To make my point clear, there are TWO types of Paleo dieters: those who do it casually, for weight loss, for a small amount of time. This is the majority of people. And then, there are these who do it for health reasons, for a LIFETIME. The second type, is supposed to eat offal, game, fermented foods, wilds, and very few of these baked goods. The book fails on the second type of dieters, which is the one advocated by those who wrote the Paleo diet books.
2563076
This is a beautiful book to look at - it's glossy and has great weight to it.  What's inside was sub-par to my perspective.  The stories could have been so much more compelling if the writing wasn't so aimed at tugging on our heart strings.  I am as much of a sucker for uplifting stories of animals as anyone.  I felt that these stories relied upon the same pattern too often to be interesting after the first few.  I support the women's effort who wrote the book but feel unless you really don't care about writing quality you would be better served to donate money to the cause rather than buy the book - unless you just want it for a pretty conversation piece to put on your coffee table.
1833419
This book is very big and heavy, but the photos are large, crisp and beautiful. Unfortunately, the captions often don't tell you when or where the images are from. Some of the text is very interesting and some of it just seems like the author's musings and are not informative. I would use this book mostly to look at the images and not necessarily for its substance. Overall it's nice to have.
3408103
I love the book alot, but there is a few things that I expected from the book. 1. I expected the coloring images to be from the second Alvin and the chipmunks film, but the images in the book are mostly from the first one, and very few coloring pages of the chipettes. 2. A few pages were colored on, but I didn't mind it. So yeah.
1335250
The aesthetics of the book itself is absolutely stunning.  It's filled with gorgeous photography of beautifully styled dished.  Vibrant and colorful, I felt that it would have been better in a magazine.  As a cookbook, I didn't think it was that easy to read.  The mixture of different fonts paired with the placement of the ingredients makes it a little difficult to quickly scan what is needed in the dish.  I felt like my eyes were all over the place.

I also may have missed the mark on the content.  Or perhaps I'm just not the target audience since most the recipes didn't really interest me.  This might be a good book for one who is either starting to learn how to cook or newly vegetarian as the recipes certainly are very simple.  There is a recipe for "Vietnamese Lentil Tacos" in the book.  I understand when a dish can be inspired by another culture's flavors but I just could not see what made it "Vietnamese".  You can't just mix whatever in Sriracha and label it as Vietnamese.
4948710
I love this book to look at.  The flowers are beautiful, and the projects are as well.  However, the instructions and illustrations are poor.  Some of them are photographs using dark fabric, so you cannot see what the directions are describing.  I found it impossible to figure out several of the folded projects.  I have done origami and all sorts of other craft, quilting, and sewing projects, so am not a novice to following directions.  This book has been a disappointment because I can't figure out how to make all the things I see in it.
1703270
We have loved the Babylit series of books and own quite a few. This is probably my least favorite of the series. The illustrations are still lovely (and very different from the Disney version and the book's original illustrations, which, as someone who also collections Alie in Wonderland stuff, did delight me), as they are with the entire series. They pair the pictures with a single color, so it is truly a colors primer.  It doesn't follow the story at all, which I also don't mind, but which some readers may not like.

The issue I have with the book is that they show only a single illustration with the single word (a color). However, there will be multiple colors in the picture and it is not always clear which color is suppose to be the dominate color. Additionally, on a few of the pages the choice of text color and background color make it hard to read.
4353446
I was really looking forward to this book but found myself disappointed while looking/reading through it.  Almost all of the pictures are too close up to really get a feel for the whole outdoor area or to get ideas from the pictures.  I'd say at least 75 percent of the pictures were underwhelming because they were just too close up.  I think if they would have just changed that one thing about the book/pictures, it would have been an amazing coffee table book and been more inspirational to get ideas from.
The written part of the book was very interesting and the remaining photos were deserving of a 5-star review.
3502177
I loved the pictures.  The photographs are vibrant and happy and show children engaged in various activities.  My 1 yo and 4 yo both have been enjoying this book, and I know for the 1 yo it's due to the lovely photographs.

I was really hoping for an amazing story to go along with the photographs given that it's by Andrew Clements, who has written such wonderful elementary-level books, and here I was disappointed.  Clements does a decent job rhyming the text--I'm pretty picky about that but his doesn't sound overly forced.  But there's not a lot of wonderful cadence or any memorable lines here...the text is almost superfluous to the great pictures.

Another oddity is the subject matter.  In each spread, there's a picture of someone doing something with their hands and someone using a tool to accomplish the same task.  For example, holding a dog vs holding a leash on a dog.  The point of each picture seems to be that tools accomplish the tasks better and more efficiently.  Yet the title and the opening pages seem to suggest the book is about hands.  The take-away message about hands, though, seems to be that they are inefficient and inferior to tools.  Possibly that is true but it seems to be a strange message for a book with this title.  I would have expected pictures of people trying to do things with tools that can be more easily accomplished by simply using your hands.  Like, um, eating a PBJ...you could eat it with a knife and fork, but aren't hands so much handier for the job?  But that is the inverse of every two-page spread of the book.

That quibble aside, it's a satisfactory book and I'm glad to have it on my shelf.  I will not mind reading it multiple times to my children and I know they will ask for it.
4417557
I love the Jesus Storybook bible, and was so excited to get this devotional.  It's really beautiful, but I may have to wait until my son is older--wasn't sure the age level intended or if it'd work for my lil' guy yet.  It starts out talking about "cataclysm of the heart" and a few other things are pretty abstract and poetic, something my 3.5 year old doesn't really understand.  I'm still glad I have it, but we may just skip around a bit and wait to fully enjoy it.
4202621
It's a beautiful book, but some definitions are hard to read in their font. Also, my book was bound backwards and upside down. Was this supposed to reflect the title of the book, or was it just a coincidence? I would definitely say that some instruction was "lost in translation."
3166552
I would actually love this book except for the size and shape of it. It is awkward to handle and as someone else commented, feels floppy.  And, I like to make a photocopy of the pattern I'm using so I can write on it and mark it up while keeping the book clean. The copies made from this book will have a landscape orientation rather than portrait (which would be preferable, for me anyway).  Otherwise, beautiful book and great content.
2587483
What a beautiful book, the photographs are exquisite and colorful.  The information in the book is sufficient as not to overwhelm the beauty of the photographs.

Highly disappointed that upon opening this book for the first time that the pages detached from the spine.  It was going to be a gift but obviously won't work for my intended purpose.