I’m sorry to say I didn’t like this one as much as I hoped to. The illustrations are fun and bright and silly, and fans of the other Henry Duck books will pick this one up and the young readers may be more willing to take it as it is, but I was hoping for something a bit more. On the very first page, when Henry’s friend Clara phones to ask him to help him with a chore that evening, but forgets to wish Henry happy birthday, any reader with much story experience is likely to already be predicting that the day will end with a surprise party at Clara’s house (spoiler alert, it does). Henry’s day proceeds as a series of pizza deliveries, as all his friends and family seems to have sent the same gift, until his table literally collapses under the weight of 14 pizzas (funny perhaps, but less than believable). Bummed that he didn’t get to enjoy any of his gifts, he trudges to his friend’s house where he is indeed surprised with a pizza party. The whole middle part of the story just seemed like filler, disconnected to the beginning and the end, except that he did get pizza after all.

It’s not bad, I guess, but I was a bit disappointed. It didn’t live up to what I expect from my Click Clack friends. Students will pick it up because they will recognize the characters. It does use lots of repetition, which is good for beginning readers. The pictures do support the text, to help students with more challenging words, and are silly enough to keep kids going. But I thought the repetition was stilted, and I would have forgiven it that if the story line led to something a bit more clever or fun, like I usually expect from this team. Basically it’s a rainy day, and no one on the farm likes the rain and mud except the cows, but the others keep bringing umbrellas and boots and sweaters to protect the cows, but then the wind blows those things away and in the end everyone is wet and suddenly everybody decides they love the rain after all. Maybe it’s my prejudice as someone who has lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest, where we get a lot of rain, but I didn’t see anything in the story to change the minds of the folks who don’t like rain to suddenly loving it. It just felt like a convenient way to end it, rather than what the story was leading to.