I have a love/hate relationship with the well known character of Pinkalicious. I should preface this with the fact that I also have a love/hate relationship with the color pink. I have never liked pink, but of course having two girls, pink is a big part of our repertoire. It is impossible to avoid purchasing pink clothes and my oldest went through a massive pink phase years ago. Luckily she has moved on to blue, but it is hard to escape pink with all of the insane marketing that exists these days. The funny part is that I don’t hate the color as much as I used to and even have incorporated some pink into my own wardrobe. But I digress.
The first book, aptly titled “Pinkalicious,” is a funny story about a girl who eats too many pink cupcakes and literally turns pink. The other hardcover books, however, I often find cringeworthy. Purpilicious has bullies and poor Pinkalicious spends most of the book hating herself; Silverlicious deals with the nice idea of not being able to taste sweet things if we are unkind to others, but does it by promoting the commercialized characters of holidays (and I’m not thrilled to see Easter and Christmas in non-holiday themed books). Emeraldicious is just sort of blah to me, although it does bring the nice message of cleaning up the earth even if it does it with magic instead of actual hard work.
On the flip side, when you step away from the expensive hard-cover books and move into the I Can Read books and the “more Pinktastic stories” there are some actual gems to be found. When we were in California over spring break, I made a trip to the local library to find some books for my girls to enjoy while at my parents’ house and for me to enjoy blogging about. I found a collection of Pinkalicious stories that included many that had wonderful messages. So why the disconnect between these books and the big name versions? I think perhaps the high end picture books try to hard and focus so much on the art work that the story suffers.
Since I have been pretty hard on some of the books in the series, I wanted to give a little bit of blog space to the books that are better. These were some of the quality stories from the collection we read in April.
The Pinkerrific Playdate – In this story, a new girl starts at Pinkalicious’s school and she’s excited to have a playdate. When the day comes, Pinkalicious has everything planned out but they can’t get to it all because they are having too much fun just talking about their favorite books, best birthdays, their teacher…This especially hits home for us since J got very specific around her last birthday, but in the end, her girlfriends just had fun doing what they do best.
Pink Hat Parade – Spring Fling Day is coming and Pinkalicious and Peter are making their hats for the parade. Both want to win. When the day of the parade arrives, it turns out that Peter has made his hat entirely out of chocolate and it melts all over him during the parade. When Pinkalicious wins, she gives her trophy to her brother because she knows how hard he had worked at it. It is a great moral lesson.
The Princess of Pink Slumber Party – At a slumber party one of Pinkalicious’s friends just wasn’t having as good of a time as everyone else. Turns out that she was afraid to sleep over at someone’s house. Pink helped her face her fears and never for a moment made her feel badly about being scared. It is a great story about true friendship.
We’ve read others in the I Can Read series and I’ve been impressed. I wish that these got the same kind of publicity as the fancier picture books.
I feel the same way! The Purplelicious book always makes my daughter sad when we read it but I guess it’s one way to talk about bullying with young kids. The paperback ones are definitely my favorite to read to her, especially the soccer one. & pink hat parade 🙂