Book review - Doodle Adventures

Title: Doodle Adventures: The Search for the Slimy Space Slugs
Author: Mike Lowery
Genre: humor
Similar books: Meet the Bigfeet by Kevin Sherry
                     Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey
Rating:

Silly and fun

Summary(provided by publisher): Pick up a pencil or pen. Sharpen your imagination! Here's an adventure story where you, the reader, directly participate. DOODLE ADVENTURES: THE SEARCH FOR SLIMY SPACE SLUGS! marries the pleasures of doodling and drawing with the fun of a ripping good story. Like a visual Mad Libs chapter book, or a graphic novel where the reader gets to help with the graphics, it celebrates engaging, gamelike, fill-in fun for middle-grade readers.
Mike Lowery brings the fresh lively look of his Kid's Awesome Activity Calendar, with more than 65,000 copies in print, to the first in a series of DOODLE ADVENTURES—lighthearted fantasy stories where the reader first draws him- or herself into the story, and then continues by following prompts and adding more illustrations and doodles. The full-color book is sturdy paper over board with beautiful cream paper—perfect for defacing! Page after page mixes Lowery's hand-lettered text with illustrations and then lots of room for the reader's contributions.
Set in space, the book invites the reader to join Carl, a duck and member of a super-secret international group of explorers, on a journey in search of a very important grail-like object—a jar with an artifact that's gone missing. By the end of the adventure, you'll have cowritten a tale you can read again and again and show off to family and friends.

My opinion: This book would have been the perfect choice for my nephew about five years ago. He's a bit too old for it now but it would be a great choice for any wildly creative kid. The bigger the imagination, the better the end result will be. It has the potential to be incredibly creative, with ridiculous and mildly gross humor. It would be fun for a kid to complete alone or as an ongoing project with a parent. There's not a great deal of plot but enough of one that a kid could potentially enjoy reading it again, even after completing all of the doodles.

Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley.