Blog Tour: Review of What The World Need Now Bees by Cheryl Rosebush @cherylrosebush @freshly_press @lovebooksgroup #lovebookstours

It is my stop on the tour for What The World Need Now Bees by Cheryl Rosebush. I have a review to share with you today and if you fancy grabbing yourself a copy of the book, you can click here. Don't forget to check out the other stops on the tour for more exclusive content and reviews.

Here's what it's all about...

Inside the sprawling forests of Ontario, Canada lives a  friendly black bear named Melly. One of Melly’s favourite  things to do is EAT! And many of the delicious fruits she  snacks on wouldn’t grow without the help of some very  important little forest creatures. 

What the World Needs Now: Bees! explores the vital role  busy, busy bees play in helping plants to grow the food  people and animals love to eat.

Review: I really love the concept of this book and indeed the others in the series. STEM is such a hot topic in early reading and in education in general right now and so to introduce children to science through a friendly character like this love bear here is such a great experience. I also appreciated the amount of scientific vocabulary used throughout the book to describe the need for bees and the different kinds of bees. 

That being said I do think that some of the scientific vocabulary would have worked better as some labels or inside fact bubbles rather than as part of the narrative. The sentence structure was generally simple and the language quite accessible for an early reader to be able to access this and then along would come a few scientific terms or overly complex ways to describe things. For me this meant that the book failed to reach it target audience and also interrupted the natural flow of the book as a whole. I was also slightly thrown when the book mentioned where black bears can be found listing, Alaska, Canada and northern Mexico as well as the USA. I feel like Alaska is part of the USA, it being one of the 50 states and all.

I really loved the illustrations in this book especially when we got to talking about the different kinds of bees. The illustrations meant that there were clear definitions between the various kinds of bees. I liked the inclusion of the bear as our guide but I would have loved to have seen her pop up again at the end to kind of sign off the whole thing if you will. I really wanted to love this book and I really do applaud what it was trying to do but it just feel short of the mark for me. 

Author Bio

I was born and raised in Southern Ontario, Canada in the cities of Burlington and St. Catharines. Long before the internet and mobile phones (now I’m aging myself!), my childhood was spent in forests and parks, on bike rides, and playing hide and seek until the streetlights came on. My family did comical Griswold-style road trips in wood-paneled station wagons. We spent summers swimming in friends’ backyards. These are my very fortunate roots.

I knew from an early age that my destiny would take me far from Southern Ontario. I graduated high school and moved to Montreal to study international politics at McGill University. The subject fascinated me, but as graduation approached, I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to do with a degree in international politics. I didn’t want to become a lawyer. I didn’t want to become a politician or civil servant. The media industry, on the other hand, intrigued me. 

The West Coast of Canada also intrigued me. So, after graduating McGill, I packed up again, moved to Vancouver and took the first media job I could get at a local Top 40 radio station (Z.95.3) in Vancouver. Best job. Great bosses. I learned so much. But after a couple of years there, the winds of change came calling again. 

September 11, 2001. In a heartbeat, Z95.3 went from playing Britney Spears to reporting up-to-the-minute information on the local, national and international fallout of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. In that moment, I knew I had found my calling. I wanted to do something that was needed on a good day, and needed even more on a bad day. I wanted to become a full-time journalist. 

So, I packed my bags again (a running theme in my life), and moved to Ottawa, Ontario to do my Masters of Journalism. Another incredible two years culminated in me getting a research internship with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) in London, England. That position helped me land back in Montreal for a second chapter there as local news reporter for the CBC. While I was there, I wore just about every hat you could in CBC’s radio and TV newsrooms. Depending on the day, I was a researcher, producer, reporter, or online writer. I even filled in for the weather reports every once in a while.

https://www.cherylrosebush.com/