NetGalley ARC Educator 550974

This is a darling book with wonderful illustrations. As a child, I too sat and watched insects go about their day. With better formatting, editing (name spellings) and maybe adding a glossary for words the kids may struggle with, this book would rate higher for some readers.

I enjoyed it and hope for more.

A cute story, but the big blocks of text, font and lack of quotation marks made it very difficult to focus on and enjoy.

The Sweetest Ladybugs is a book about Johana, a six year old girl. She loves spending her time looking at insect images in her father book. One day she saw a cricket with a tall hat on the top of his hat. Then her bizarre adventure began.

I enjoy reading this book but I think there are some words that too advanced for children. The paragraph is quite long as well.

Johana was sometimes written as Joana. I am not sure if this is typo because I found Joana in some paragraphs.

I like the illustration. Those insects are cute. I like the colorful butterfly.

The idea the book is based on is cute and intriguing. The main character was likeable but her name was spelt incorrectly in so many places that it made the book distracting to read. The sentence structure was awkward and didn't flow in a way that I am used to. Again, found this distracting and difficult to read. The book was too much work to read for enjoyment or as a read aloud in the classroom.

This is a cute little story where the illustrations outshine the content.
Johana is a smart little girl who is fascinated by her father’s scientific books about insect. When she meets a magical cricket who shrinks her to insect size and takes her on a wonderful journey through the outside world, she learns a lot and enjoys herself as well.
The story is more of a fun adventure with bits of information about insects. The illustrations are really cute. Johana is adorable, both as a little girl as well as later in her ladybug costume. The cricket is based a lot on Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio.
While the cover page and illustrations make it look like it is meant for really young readers, there are some difficult words in the text such as “dapper” and “foliage” which will necessitate adult support while reading.
I didn’t enjoy this read as much as I had thoughts because of some formatting issues:
1. The font was really small in my ARC copy and as a result the text looked very cluttered.
2. I don’t get why the spoken dialogues were separated with an em dash rather than with quotation marks. This added to the cluttered feel.
3. Typo in the last page: Johana is written as “Joana”.

If the formatting is taken care of, the story will certainly have a better appeal.

3.5 stars from me.

My thanks to Underline Publishing LLC and NetGalley for the ARC of “The Sweetest Ladybug”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

Adorably illustrated, The Sweetest Ladybug is an imaginative picture book about a little girl, Johana, who is fascinated with the world of insects. She finds a cricket in the house who turns out to have a magic flute he uses to shrink her, then he takes her to a party in the insect world, and afterward returns her to her bed. The story itself is engaging and the colorful illustrations carry the story well. I found the incorrect punctuation with regard to dialog problematic The dialog was formatted as if it were a casual list or text, using a dash symbol to signify both thoughts and spoken word, which results in some muddled dialog. For that reason, I would not recommend it for school and public library collections for emergent readers.

Such a cute little story about a child thinking about exploring the world of insects.

I feel the story and the characters are well presented with simple writing and basic illustrations. The pages are quite cheerful.

Hope there are more books in this with more exploration of the world of insects and other wildlife.

Thank you, author/artist and the publisher,for the advance reading copy.