4 out of 4 stars
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Mabel Anderson is a special little anthropomorphic bunny girl. Not only is she throwing a big, elegant tea party for her bunny friends, but she's also celebrating their collective creation of two hundred cookbooks, all written to raise money for Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital. She's also the star of Mabel Anderson Has an Elegant Tea Party, an adorable children's book by Alma R. Melton.
The book has two major components to it: Mabel preparing for the party, and then the party itself, with each taking around half of the book. The preparations are lovely; Mabel makes food, sets up the decorations, finishes working on her special dress, gets her hair done, and more. This section alone could easily be used with children: the food and decorations can be played out with toys or for a real party at home together as a family, and the hair and dress portions could easily be used for children who are scared of getting their hair cut or who want to reward a child with a special outfit. Heck, it may even work for people like me who hated getting dressed in anything fancier than a t-shirt. The second half of the book is the party itself, where Mabel and 12 of her bunny friends get together. They celebrate, they eat, and they talk about how they can't wait for the next party!
While preparing for the party, Mabel finds some "adorable cross key chains" that she gets for each of the guests, and the bunnies pray together before their meal during the party. Mabel also says a prayer before bed, but aside from these three moments across nearly 50 pages, the rest of the book foregoes religion altogether. This felt like the perfect level of religion in the book: it made these things seem natural and ordinary while showing that they do them on a regular basis. Alma doesn't beat people over the head with these things, and the bunnies are so positive and kind that it's easy to see they're living their beliefs as well.
Combining cute bunnies with tea parties is like a thematic jackpot for many children, and Courtney Tolbert does a good job with the illustrations. There are full-page illustrations and smaller images with bordered pages, but every page is covered with color in one way or another. I read a PDF version of the book, although it's only available for sale in physical versions, and even on my laptop screen, the images look saturated with paint. Have you ever painted a page with watercolor or finger paint, and when you're done the back of the page feels wet? That's the feeling I had flipping through the images, which is rather remarkable for a digital reproduction! With that said, I do wish the faces were painted just a little bit better, particularly the blushing cheeks and eyes. Most of the time they're fine, but occasionally they look a bit off.
Mabel Anderson Has an Elegant Tea Party is recommended for children between the ages of 5 and 6 on Amazon, and I would absolutely agree with that. This is definitely a book for young children, girls especially. If your child has a beloved bunny stuffed animal, that'd make it even easier for them to get into this elegant little tea party. I found three grammatical errors, but they were all essentially the same exact error: the use of "guest" instead of "guests". With some good writing, adorable art, pages that look like they're somehow still dripping with paint, and a complete lack of rhymes (which also means a complete lack of forced rhymes), my rating of Mabel Anderson Has an Elegant Tea Party is 4 out of 4 stars. People who are actively anti-religion will want to stay away from this book, but anyone else should be fine with the two inclusions of prayer.
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MABEL Anderson has An Elegant Tea Party.
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