Review of "Why?" by Elena Kayne

Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)

Why? is a fun, humorous, well-illustrated, and heartwarming children's book by Elena Kayne!
This charming book explores the topic of childlike wonder, naivety, and innocence.

Ella stars as the main character of this book—based on the author's daughter of the same name. Ella's curiosity gives the book both its name and its unique, entertaining sense of humor. See, Ella is about three-years-old, so the world is brand new to her. She still isn't sure what makes the sun go up and what makes the moon go down, she just knows that they appear to.

She wonders why grass is green and why egg yolks are yellow. She wonders why the dishes have to be washed and why the soap is pink.

She wonders why her skin becomes wrinkly when she spends too much time in the bath and why her belly button is pushed in (mistakenly written as "pushed it").

She even wonders if we really get cheese from the Moon.

Thankfully, Ella's wise, experienced, loving, and understanding mom is always there to entertain and answer her questions.

For example, she explains to Ella that grass is green because of chlorophyll.

Ella believes that her mom is unusually wise and possibly has archaic or otherworldly knowledge, even exclaiming, "Mommy, was it a million years ago when you were little?" Honestly, that's the biggest unintentional diss in the history of our contest and also (arguably) the best moment in the book. It's certainly one of the funniest.

That moment has competition though. Another great and funny moment is when Ella says that her grandma must take really, really, really long showers because of how wrinkly her skin is!

That's hilarious.

This book is well-illustrated by Tetiana Matikiv! Matikiv crafts some beautiful and cute characters including Ella, Ella's mom, and grandma. A particularly cute character is the family's curious pet dog who is present in most of the illustrations, adding some spice to them.

This book does have a few notable weaknesses. First of all, it could've used some proofreading.

We get the line "Why is my belly button pushed it?" instead of "Why is my belly button pushed in?"
The word "Really" is repeatedly misspelled as "Raelly."

Another issue with this book is that is sometimes seems to lack focus and seem random. For example, there's a scene in which her Ella's mom randomly misplaces her phone only to find it in the fish tank. She's all smiling afterward.

In real life, most people would be flustered or angry that their phone got wet.
There's a scene in which Ella stubs her foot and compares her toes to little piggies. This is cute and charming but also a bit random.

There's also a speech bubble on page 13 that doesn't seem attributed to a visible character and is actually mixed up with some of the other text.

The copy of the book we got was 100 pages long, but the second half of the book was a duplicate of the first half.

Despite these things, this is still an entertaining, cute, and beautiful book.

Check it out on Amazon!