Kids book blogging

It's time again for kids book blogging. This week my girls picked out just 5 books from the library. When we left the kids' area and headed towards the reception desk, we had six books, but by the time we reached the desk, one of them had lost a book along the way. Pretty typical for my girls!

Here are the books for this week and the applicable male/female character ratios:

• Bob the Builder-Let's Find Colors: 5:2. The boys rule, as usual. Once again, I used Wikipedia's page on Bob the Builders to ascertain the sexes of the mostly machine characters.
  
• I Love You: 2:1 (0:0), although I'm inclined to call this book gender neutral. There was a male farmer, and a page that showed the feet of a boy and a girl. All of the animals were androgynous, with the possible exception of two ducks, who were wearing swimming caps with flowers on them--strongly suggesting that they were female, although their gender was not entirely clear. Accordingly, even though this book may have had more males than females, I'm going to tabulate it as 0:0.
  
• When Someone is Afraid: 2:2. The main character is a little boy, and he refers to a bunch of animals. Those whose gender is unknown to him (ie. wild animals) he calls "it" or "they", but refers to his pets by their gender. The cat is a girl and the dog a boy. And, he states that when he is afraid, he calls his mommy or daddy, although his mom happens to respond in the book when he is afraid. So, even though the female is in a stereotypical role in this book, the (female) author obviously gave some thought to gender issues, and I'd call this one gender neutral.
  
• Jimmy's Boa and the Bungee Slam Dunk: 3:3. The main character is a little girls who recounts to her mother her day at school. There is a male coach and a female dance teacher, and a little boy named Jimmy who owned a male snake. Although this book has an even ratio, it has a number of stereotypical gender roles in place (female teacher, male coach, little girl in dance class, little boy involved in sports, mother listening to child's story), it's not exactly a great example of a gender nuetral book, in my opinion.
• Bitter Bananas: 1:0. The main character is a little boy, and all other characters are andrgymous baboons.

Tally for this week: 11:7.

I'm always amazed by the total each week. Even on weeks such as this one, that didn't seem as overwhelmingly male character dominated, the girls still end up trailing by quite a bit.

Overall tally: 53:27. *sigh*