When my daughter came across The Library Gingerbread Man by Dotti Enderle, I suspected I would love it.

And I did.

I probably should have been a librarian.

Sigh… not the point.

Anyway, the book is really cute and clever, placing the familiar story of the Gingerbread Man into the setting of a library.

I like how the author incorporates the dewey decimal system into the story.  For example, some of the characters that try to catch the Gingerbread Man are a word wizard who pops out of a thesaurus in 423.1 and a robot with stilted commands who emerges from a science fiction book in 629.892.

He meets more and more characters until he finally runs into a hungry fox.  But he doesn’t get eaten, because the librarian saves the day.

My girls absolutely loved chanting, “Run, run, as fast as you can.  You can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man!”

My 4yo is still singing it.  (I guess we haven’t read a bunch of Gingerbread Man stories before now.)

The only complaint I had was that the text got a little lengthy once the cookie started reciting who he was running away from (I ran away from the librarian and the word wizard and the robot…).

Once I skipped over most of those descriptions and stuck to the basic “you can’t catch me,” but then I decided to test their reactions to reading out each of the characters he was running from.  My girls seemed to like it when I read the full text.  Maybe because it made the story last longer.  I’m not sure, but I decided to go with it.  I use a fun voice, though, to keep it from getting tedious, if only for me.

Anyway, we enjoyed The Library Gingerbread Man, and I recommend it to anyone who loves books.