This is a Mini Book Review for Disney-Pixar The World of Cars: Tractor Tipping, for the LeapFrog Tag Reading System.

So you picked-up a recently released LeapFrog Tag Reading System book and you spot Lightning McQueen and Mater from Disney-Pixar’s Cars movie on the cover. You think to yourself, “Cool beans!” Then you read the title Tractor Tipping and you open the book only to discover that the 17-page story is devoted to a retelling of the events in the movie. Ugh. Then to top it off, you listen to the voices for Lightning McQueen and Mater and think that although they’re close, they don’t exactly sound like Owen Wilson (Lightning McQueen) and Larry The Cable Guy (Mater), which begs the question, why couldn’t they create some new material? You've got two great established characters, so do something new with them.

Okay, perhaps I should cut LeapFrog a break in that most of the early releases for the Tag are based on existing material.  But couldn’t they have picked something other than the Tractor Tipping scene?  That said, my 4-year-old Caleb, loved the story and had fun playing the games.  There are 3 reading-comprehension games associated with the story. And the pages contain clickable art to explore, just not as much as some other Tag Titles.  At the end, there are games to help teach reading words with ‘a’ and ’e’, ‘wh’, ‘sh’, ‘ch’, and ‘th’ sounds in words, compound words, and learning parts of a car.

So far, this particular title stands out as one of Caleb’s favorites, most likely due to the subject matter.  Therefore, he has decided to give Tractor Tipping 10 out of 10 stars.  As for me, well, I was hoping for just a bit more then a rehashing of such a ‘meh’ scene from the movie, so I’m going to give it 5 Dancing Elephants out of 8.