Product Review: Fabulous Franko and His Fabulous Toys [Hardcover]‏ (Age 3+)

Fabulous Franko Shows Kids the Power of Imaginative Thinking

I spent a lot of my childhood off in my own little world of imagination.  I loved to spend time outdoors making forts in the woods and pretending like our tiny shed in the backyard was my own log cabin.  I even built my own rickety tree house where I would go and read and imagine being far away on some adventure.  When my little sister got a little older, I would make up little fanciful stories for us to play and I remember two names of recurring games we played that I called ‘Cartwheels’ and ‘Princesses’.  I honestly can’t remember what the stories were about now, but we did have fun playing these games together.  I think a children’s story from a child’s perspective who learns that you can have adventures with the power of your own imagination is just fantastic and I could not wait to get my hands on a copy of Fabulous Franko to read to Brooke!

Fabulous Franko and His Fabulous Toys is the fabulously (I have to see how many times I could use fabulous in one sentence!) imaginative first children’s book by Australian author, Jane Matlock.   This story is written in British-English with a nice American-English translation (think tyre versus tire) in the back of the book.  Fabulous Franko is a good friend to our little narrator who tells wild and imaginative stories of his friend and his incredible toys that he uses to go on adventures.  Travel to outer space in a space ship?  No problem!  Travel the oceans on a private boat?  Of course!  All the while Franko seems to have very bad luck with all of his toys and his car, plane, motorbike and even his spaceship all come to a smashing end.  Franko finds himself broke and out of all of his fabulous toys and he wonders how he will maintain his fabulousness.  Ah ha!  Why of course, we use our minds and our hands and think up things with our imagination!  The words are written in a fun, rhyming verse that adds to the whimsical quality of Jane’s book.  The illustrations are beautiful and are from Colorado resident Kate Seeley (check out her website here) who graduated from Parson’s School of Design in NYC.  All in all a wonderful and – dare I say – fabulous read for kids!