2 out of 4 stars
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Sigfried’s Smelly Socks! is a children’s book written and illustrated by Len Foley. It is written in a humorous tone, and as with many children’s books, it features illustrations on every page, rhymes, and not a very large amount of text. While it really didn’t really stand out to me as a particularly memorable children’s book, I still appreciate how colorful and whacky it was, and the fact that doesn’t take itself very seriously, so I suppose for some children, it might be a fun read.
The book is centered around smells, or more precisely, bad smells. The protagonist is Sigfried, but the book doesn’t spend very much time on him as the majority of the text focuses on different objects whose common denominator is that they all smell quite horrible. The illustrations are collages made from mixing drawings with photos. The colors are bright and the art style is made to be quite silly and caricature-esque, which definitely is appropriate for a children’s book, even if the overall aestethic didn’t really agree with my tastes on a personal level. However, I liked that it was well-drawn, and you can tell that the Foley put effort into designing each page.
Most pages in the beginning urge the reader to smell the pages, which the author claims smell bad from different things left/wiped on them. However, this felt like a strange choice to me, as obviously, the pages won’t smell of anything other than paper if you smell them. I felt like, if this were to be read by a child, it would probably confuse them, so I don’t really see the point of doing this to be honest.
The book also doesn’t really serve as an encouragement for children to be more cleanly, as the author also decides to end it on a toilet humor-based twist. I had a hard time seeing what the point of the book really was. Even though children’s books don’t necessarily have to have a message, or even a coherent plot, really, I didn’t really find it humorous either, so if the point was to get a good laugh out of it, it ended up falling a little flat, at least for me.
Overall, even though I probably am not the target audience, I can’t really say that Sigfried’s Smelly Socks! was my kind of book if I compare it to what I read and liked when I was a child. It wasn’t my kind of humor, and to be honest, if I had a child, my first choice of book to read for them probably wouldn’t be a book about things that stink. However, I could still appreciate that at least Foley seemed to have fun creating this book, and that he didn’t just throw together a bunch of rhymes and pictures randomly. My rating of this book is 2 out of 4 stars, because ultimately, it wasn’t my type of book, but I think, for some children, it might be a fun read if they appreciate this specific sort of humor and general randomness and silliness.
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Sigfried’s Smelly Socks!
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