AmySea

Batman : The Copycat Crime was one of my nephew's library book choices today, and we liked it. It is a chapter book, it features The Riddler (kind of a lame villain), and the illustrations were ok, but not eye-popping, so my nephew enjoyed this book less than some of his other superhero stories. It's Batman, so he still loves it, but it's a long Batman.

The story in this one was actually fairly intense for a kid's book, and the crime here doesn't involove mutant gorillas trying to steal Gotham's giant diamond, or space aliens turning the Super Friends into lizards or something. The crime here is the kidnapping of a child, and the frantic search to find the child before real harm comes to him. This proves to be challenging for Mom, the police, and even for Batman, so this storyline drips with a more real-world threat. Because the threat is more real-world, this story has the potential to provoke more emotion in kids. If I had known this before we read it, I probably wouldn't have read this to my four year old nephew. He seemed fine with it, and he wasn't scared, but I can see that some kids might be. Batman : The Copycat Crime probably isn't meant for pre-schoolers--it's probably better suited to kids second or third grade and up. Older kids would be more likely to get The Riddler's riddles, too.