Review of “Raccoons Go Rafting: Activity & Coloring Book” by Rachel Vogel

Score: 90/100 (9.0 out of 10)

Raccoons Go Rafting: Activity & Coloring Book is the fun and engaging companion piece to Raccoons Go Rafting by Rachel Vogel, illustrated by Anthony Richichi!

The book features a variety of the activities and coloring pages you might expect from such a book and a few bonuses.

Actually, for better or for worse, a lot of the bonus content is relegated to the front of the book. There's a rather interesting (albeit initially confusing) one in which you can fill out the quote bubbles of the different characters. That's new, fresh, and unique!

We do wish the bubbles were a little bigger though since kids may be using crayons or not have the fine-motor skills to write inside something so small. The same goes for some of the illustrations. When you have figures like the raccoons that are so small compared to the size and scale of the illustrations, it's a bit more challenging to color. This is something we also commented on with the Where Are You, Alfie? coloring book. Ideally with a coloring book, you want the figures to be bigger and for the lines to be further apart, allowing space for coloring, especially with larger coloring instruments like crayons. You practically need a fine-point coloring pencil to color some of these characters.

There's a lot of big, empty space to color the water and the sky, perhaps.

It can also be fun to color the different floaty vests of the raccoons with the vest-matching designations on page 3.

The first-half of the book mostly consists of fill-in-the-blank quote box activities. The second-half of the book contains more of the activities you'd expect to find in an activity book like this including crossword puzzles, line mazes, and—our personal favorite—finding specific objects on the camp site.

At the end of the book, there is actually a great compilation of different trivia facts regarding raccoons and the Hudson River.

While this coloring/activity book might leave a little to be desired for the above reasons, it's still cute, fun, and entertaining.

Check it out on Amazon!