Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is very pretty. I've read it to a group of children (not my choice - a teacher asked me to do so) and to my own child, who got it out of the library, and I've certainly seen its appeal to young children. They can't sit still. They just have to reach out and touch the lovely, shiny, foil scales. (Although the look of disappointment on their faces when they find out it's just a flat surface is also obvious.) I think getting children interested in books at a young age is crucial, so ordinarily I would love a book with this kind of appeal, even if it wasn't a book that especially appealed to me. I perfectly understand that sometimes children and adults have different tastes. But this book, despite its prettiness, is awful. A beautiful fish, different from all the other fish because of his glittering, jewel-colored scales, has a hard time making friends, because the other fish don't like the fact that he does not look like them. In order to win friends, he gives away his scales, one by one, until all the fish in the ocean look alike. I understand that the book is supposed to be about sharing, but giving away everything you have isn't sharing, it's buying friends. That's something many young children are already prone to do, and it's not something any caring parent or teacher would want to encourage. The book's success also bothers me because it is a blatant rip-off of a much better book - Leo Lionni's classic Tico and the Golden Wings. In Lionni's book, a bird gives away the golden feathers of its wings. But the tone of the book is very different. Lionni's bird is born without wings, unable to fly. He wishes for wings, and is granted golden ones. As he flies around the world, he sees people living lives of great hardship and he gives each person one of his golden feathers in order to help them. Each time he gives away a golden feather, a real one grows in its place. In the end, his bird friends see him with his black wings and tell him that now he's just like them. But Tico realizes that although he looks like them, he is different inside. Unlike The Rainbow Fish, Tico and the Golden Wings teaches children to be generous AND to be themselves. It doesn't make it seem like it's impossible to be a unique individual and still get along with others.