This is one of those hit you over the head with the moral books, an annoying, cloying story, not to mention the terrible message of mom taking the girl to the candy store when she feels bad. Ugh. However, my 2 year old loved the sparkly cover and the dancing bug costumes.

That review was for the board book. The full book is better, the story is fleshed out more and makes more sense. My daughter still loves this book! ( )

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A young puppy dog named Emily, dancing. She danced while doing mostly everything and skipped all the way to her first dance practice. She joined a class that she really did not fit into. As the classes went on, Emily still was not enjoying her classmate's company. One day, Emily and the three others: Bitsy, Anna, and Nicole, discovered that the beginning letters of their names spell out the word "bean". Realizing this, Emily went to the candy store and bought jellybeans for her and the three girls. They immediately became friends at this point and were able to bond over their love of jellybeans. They even decided to nickname themselves as the dancing jellybeans.
This was not one of my favorite stories. Although I enjoyed the concept that it is not always easy to fit in, I found the text to be very confusing. The constant changing of character names was hard to follow. I never really understood which animal was Bitsy, Anna, or Nicole. I feel that if I were able to understand this better, then my experience may have been a little different. Children may also feel differently about this because although I was unable to fully follow, I did still enjoy the illustrations and the costumes that the dancing jellybeans wore. ( )

I really enjoyed reading this book about the importance of accepting others differences to allow for friendships to grow. The two aspects of this book I liked the most were its development of the plot with a clear conflict and solution, as well as the author's inclusion of descriptive dialog to highlight the building conflict in the story. The cute series events, such as discovering how they all like different hobbies and don't all love to dance, built the tension of the dancers' differences in a well-paced manner, engaged the reader in the plot. Also, the dialog between the main characters adds a personal aspect to the story, which helped the story develop more than it would have without it. This is shown well when the girls discuss how jellybeans are their favorite candy, with all of its "different flavors, but they still go well together", just like the girls. The inclusion of these aspects made this story stand out in my mind with its fun details and character interaction. ( )

This story is about a little girl that starts a new dance class and is surprised to find out that her classmates would rather be doing other things. But she finds a way to bring her classmates together and push past their differences to become friends and make something great!