Eloise In Hollywood

Title: Eloise In Hollywood
Author: Kay Thompson
Illustrator: Ted Enik
Based on the art of: Hilary Knight
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Summary: Eloise In Hollywood is a book about a young girl named Eloise who dreams of going to Hollywood.  Eloise's mother calls and says that she and her grandmother must come and visit, and so the journey begins.  The story then begins to revolve around all of her activities once she is there, what she does, who she sees, and all of the crazy hijinks that she gets into.  Eloise begins her journey by telling us about how she will be getting to Beverly Hills, where she will be staying and how fabulous it all is.  The story follows Eloise on her journey through Hollywood until she finally gets her big break and is allowed onto a movie set, auditions for a director, and becomes a big star.  It all comes to an end at the end of the story when she is going down what looks to be a red carpet and says that what she really dreams to do is, "direct". 

I enjoy the Eloise books, however I did think this book would be a bit hard for a young reader to follow and read.  The word choice that the author chose within the book at times seemed awkward while reading and often times I found myself stumbling while reading this children's book.  I think the book is a great book for a fun read, and to ignite the imagination but I would not necessarily use it as part of a lesson.  I also thought the story was a bit hard to follow in the sense that the text was all over the place on the pages.  There were times when I missed text and had to go back and read it because it blended into the picture so much.

Something that I did really like about this book were the illustrations.  I really liked the pencil drawing look to the illustrations and the low amount of colors within the story.  The times when there was color on the pages it made it "pop" that much more and didn't box me into looking at the illustrations in one manner.  My favorite part of the book was the pullout illustration of the backlot that was done all in color, it was such a pleasant and unexpected surprised.