Review of “Where Are You, Alfie? Coloring & Activity Book” by Mary DeSantis, Illustrated by Anthony Richichi

Score: 90/100 (9.0 out of 10)

Where Are You, Alfie? was one of the the sweetest and most heartwarming children's books to come our way last year! An entire community banded together to find one adorable pup who went missing, pulling all their resources to make the magical reunion happen.

Where Are You, Alfie? Coloring & Activity Book now allows young readers to directly engage with this beautiful story of teamwork, camaraderie, and hoping against all hope.

The book provides over 20 pages of coloring pages and activities of various kinds, from crossword puzzles to mazes!

Now, one concern that we had was that Anthony Richichi's original art may not translate too well to coloring book format. The reason we had that concern (which turned out, in our opinion, to be somewhat accurate) is that Richichi tends to draw figures from a distance with the lines of objects closer together. This was especially noticeable in the original book because the scope of the book was so great, spanning events across the city and crossing state lines. Ultimately, this meant that a lot of the figures, people, and objects were smaller and further away from the perspective of the reader.

In other words, this doesn't leave much room for actually coloring, except with maybe a very fine color pencil. You can't really go after this coloring book with a crayon. Usually, with a children's coloring book, you want at least one very large object somewhere in the middle of the book. Interestingly, Richichi's brother, Dr. Joe Richichi, published a coloring book of his own called Colorful Creatures which seemed to better follow this template (though it struggled in other ways).

With that said, this book isn't just a coloring book. The activity pages pleasantly surprised us with their cleverness and ingenuity. Some of these activities are unique to the story of the book. For example, there's a line-maze to help Alfie to join other dogs who are across a lawn and behind a fence, calling out to him. There's another clever activity that has you count the people and drones that are out looking for Alfie. Both of these activities really make you feel like you're helping Alfie and the people looking for Alfie.

Probably our favorite activity in this book is the town meeting scene in which the reader is invited to find and identify various objects in and around the crowd.

Activity books are great tools to help children (and even adults) to exercise their cognitive abilities, testing things like recognition and following directions.

Check it out on Amazon!