Sebastien had been looking forward to reading this book ever since we saw a "Coming Soon!" advertisement at the end of one of the other Humphrey books. We were super excited to finally read it!
In many ways, this book delivers just what you would expect from a Humphrey book. Humphrey pays attention in class, he sometimes leaves his cage during the week when the school is empty, and he goes home with his classroom friends on the weekends and finds ways to help them. But, in my opinion, the overarching storyline is lacking. Mrs. Brisbane is teaching the kids about writing and storytelling, and they each have to write a piece of fiction imagining what they would do if they could fly. Writing came easily for some kids while other kids struggled. I'm sorry to say, it just wasn't very exciting or interesting to me.
Sebastien enjoyed the book as expected, but even he gave it 4 stars - instead of his usual 5 stars for Humphrey books - because the book defined a word inaccurately! On page 45, at the start of chapter 5, Mrs. Brisbane introduces the class to homonyms. According to the book, examples of homonyms are "groan" and "grown", and "ate" and "eight". To be honest, I am pretty sure that's what I remember learning in elementary school myself, about 30 years ago. However, Sebastien's first grade class has been talking about homophones all year, and his teacher made it very clear that "homophones" are words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings - like "groan" and "grown" - while "homonyms" are words that sound the same and are spelled the same, but have different meanings - like "weigh on a scale" and "scale the wall". One quick Google search confirms that, in the strictest sense, Sebastien's teacher is correct, but also that some people and some dictionaries do allow for broader definitions of "homonym", which frequently leads to confusion.
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