Title: Tiggle Takes off

Sub-Title: Personal Development for Children Series - Gratitude - With supporting notes for parents/teachers and children

Authors: Amal & Santa Simothy, Hitul & Seema Thobani

Illustrator: Anca Delia Budeanu

Publisher: Kidz4mation

ISBN: 978-0-9563260-1-0

Genre: Fiction / Children

Presentation: Soft Cover colorfully illustrated and plastic coated

This particular booklet is on the theme of being thankful, gratitude. Mikey (the monkey child) goes daily to play with his favorite tree Tiggle, but does not think any time of thanking his friend. One day, this gets to Tiggle and Tiggle starts weeping at the way he is being ignored by his friend. His friend Genie agrees to have a talk with Mikey and instead of preaching the morals and thus putting off his friend Mikey, Genie adopts a rather novel, practical approach to bring home the lessons of being thankful, being grateful, not to take one's blessings for granted etc. Needless to say, the story ends on a happy note and both the friends Mikey and Tiggle are very happy.

The printing is excellent - colorful, eye catching, on good art paper, plastic coated to withstand little grimy hands! The illustrations are good. However, I could not but help noticing something interesting - both Mikey and Tiggle are very happy but they forget to thank their friend the Genie! This just goes to show the difficulty in being thankful all the time!

The authors rightly bring out the importance of being thankful for all the blessings in our life in their note at the end.  But the real power of gratitude comes out when we start being grateful for everything around us, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly... May be they could revise their advice in the next edition.  

The booklet will make excellent reading for children and their caregivers.