Review: "Wonderland: A Coloring Book Inspired by Alice's Adventures" by Amily Shen

Wonderland: A Coloring Book Inspired by Alice's Adventures is more than just pages to color: there's also activities and a story. The papers is nice and thick, so no need to worry about markers bleeding through the double sided pages.

The book is divided into 9 sections, each beginning with a "title page" and a few paragraphs of story. The following 4-6 pages are beautiful designs related to the story just presented. For this reason, this coloring book is unusual in that you may want to go through the coloring pages in order, to fully experience the story.





There are several activities spread throughout, such as a maze, hidden pictures, and suggesting that you add your own drawings to specific pages. You also get to solve the mystery of who ate the Queen of Hearts' cakes. I wasn't interested in the activity parts of the book, but they are not overdone or obtrusive if you're only interested in coloring.



Some of the illustrations are single pages, while others run both sides. While it's nice to have a large and complex scene to color, this book has a lot of designs that are in the fold, making it extremely difficult and testing for the perfectionist in me that doesn't want any white showing in the middle where the pencils can't reach!

Other features of note are a to/from dedication page and the removable dust jacket that you can color the inside of for an extra long coloring experience.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review: "Cats in Paris: A Magical Coloring Book" by Won-Sun Jang

Cats in Paris: A Magical Coloring Book is an eclectic collection of drawings. The first 12 pages are the Paris pages. Though they're my favorite coloring pages in the book, they are ruined for me by having a silly line of text on the page: "Let's take a rest by the Eiffel Tower." Just let the cat be next to the Eiffel Tower - it doesn't require commentary. The cat also visits Shakespeare & Company, Notre-Dame, and Monmarte. That is actually all that has to do with Paris in the book.

There's a lot of pages, like the one above, where the cats are layered with flowers or other designs. It is an interesting concept, but I thought there were too many uses of the technique. I didn't find it particularly enjoyable to have to think about what I wanted to be the "top" layer of color. Sometimes the cats are roughly drawn - the lines don't all connect to provide an enclosed place to color. That didn't bother me too much, but I preferred the cats that had completed lines.

The coloring pages are double-sided, but the paper is good quality and even heavy marker use didn't bleed through to the other side. The drawings often cover the entire spread for 2 full pages of coloring a particular pattern. However, especially in this full-spread designs, the images almost always run through the gutter, making the inside half-inch of the book un-colorable, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. It makes the drawings look unfinished.

The last 14 pages were very disappointing. There are 6 pages of cat postal stamps that really don't appeal to me at all. That's followed up with 4 pages of hipster cats wearing glasses and bowties - also just not good looking cats that you'd want to color. The second to last spread is just paw prints all over both pages. There was a similar pages earlier in the book that also included a cat, so this felt like an overly simplified repeat. I probably won't bother coloring any of those.

Overall, I'd say I'm interested in coloring about half of these cats. Do not get this book if you are really looking forward to coloring Paris, as that's not even an eighth of the content. If overlapping cats and flowers/designs seems appealing to you, you'd probably enjoy most of this book.

The cover of the book is beautiful, but horribly misleading. If all pages were of similar quality, this would be a fantastic coloring book.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for free from Blogging for Books for this review.  The opinion in this review is unbiased and reflects my honest judgment of the product.

Review: "The Time Chamber" by Daria Song

"Whatever the fairy touched, no matter how mundane, turned into something beautiful and mysterious."

The Time Chamber by Daria Song is an intricate coloring book for adults and young adults. Unlike other popular coloring books, this one has a story line with a sentence or two on a few pages throughout the book. It tells the tale of a young fairy who lives inside a cuckoo clock and decides to venture outside to experience the wonders of the human world. The story didn't add much to the experience for me, but I could appreciate its uniqueness and imagine a pre-teen really enjoying it.


The illustrations are full of tiny details to explore and color, though it's also not too overwhelming. Many coloring pages have the fairy on them. Some of my favorites included a vanishing library and a chandelier room. There are also two visual lists of hidden objects that you can identify throughout the book, with a key at the end.

I used color pencils, which worked well even in the small details. The pages are double-sided, so I did try out a marker and pen to check for bleed-through, which wasn't too bad, but some of the images have a lot of open white space where it would be painfully obvious. Many of the illustrations run the spread, which creates a large two-page design, but also unfortunately means that there are illustrations running right through the gutter making them near impossible to color.

All things considered, there's a good variety in detail level and design of the images, so as long as you're on board with the fairy theme, this coloring book is definitely worth checking out. You can even color in the both sides of the removable dust jacket. There's also a to/from page at the beginning - good to remember when you're looking for that last minute gift.

The colorable inside of the removable dust jacket.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for free from Blogging for Books for this review.  The opinion in this review is unbiased and reflects my honest judgment of the product.