Fireman Sam:To the rescue!

Little Man has just started to get back into having a book read to him, having gone through a stage of not be being able to sit still and concentrate on anything for more than 30 seconds. From my previous reviews you can see that Pontypandy's favourite fire fighter is a regular fixture in our house, so it is no surprise to me that one of his most requested books is Fireman Sam to the Rescue.

I actually found this book in Pound Land before Christmas, along with Mountain Emergency and couldn't believe my luck as there does not seem to be that many Fireman Sam titles easily available. It is a 12 page board book, based on one of the older stop motion episodes of Fireman Sam. Each page has half a page of pictures and half a page of text. I believe that the book has been written to be read to a child rather than them reading it themselves as there are a lot of words in it. The book is written like an episode of the show and I always find myself putting on a dodgy Italian accent when reading Bella and vigorously exclaiming 'Great Fires of London' when reading Sam.

Fireman Sam to the Rescue begins when Bella's cat Rosa goes missing. The twins James and Sarah go looking for her and find her trapped in a barbed wire fence, but there is a storm coming! Can Sam and the crew rescue her before the bad weather arrives? And How many fireman does it take to save a cat?
It always makes me laugh, even with the TV show how many fire officers they send to deal with minor incidents!

To be honest the plot of this book is as weak as it sounds, and I think there are lots of better episodes they could have used to make a book. They seemed to struggle to fill the pages - 1 whole page was devoted to unhooking Rosa's collar from the fence! They probably could have lost a few pages and made the text more detailed, or kept the same amount of pages and used less words in a read it yourself style. However Little man loves to have this book read to him, so it can't be all bad! He loves to point out the characters and discuss what is going on - I get a lot of 'Rosa's stuck on the Fence' and 'Help Rosa, Elvis!' which is great for his language skills.

The RRP for this book is £3.99 so to get it for a pound is a real bargain, but I wouldn't have wanted to pay much more for it as there are a lot of better books for the money. It seems to be out of standard print as it only appears to be available through the Amazon Marketplace. Available from 1p used (plus £2.80 postage), so I would recommend checking out Pound Land for this one!