¡Más te vale, Mastodonte!

Twitter is in an uproar, and everyone seems to be creating Mastodon accounts as backups, which gives me the perfect excuse to talk about ¡Más te vale, Mastodonte!

I found this book at my local library while looking for fun Spanish language easy reader books for my boys. I myself don’t have as much fluency in Spanish as I should, though my wife does, and wants to pass on to our kids. I had already come across Dinosaurios Bebés and Titanosaur, but I was excited to find a storybook that was up my alley as well! The fun alliteration of the title ¡Más te vale, Mastodonte! (does it count as a pun?) immediately caught my attention, and I knew we would enjoy reading this one aloud together.

We are introduced to the titular mastodon (which perhaps looks a little more like a mammoth, but we’ll ignore that) by a young boy, who keeps it in his house. Playing the part of a pet parent, he does his best to get the mastodon to behave and help out around the house, but it always simply responds with “¡NO!”

Frustrated with his belligerent pachyderm, the boy shouts “¡Más te vale, Mastodonte!”, which doesn’t seem to translate directly to English, but means something like “You’d better listen, Mastodon!” Unfortunately, the mastodon responds by behaving even worse than before!

What’s our young protagonist to do? I’ll let you find out for yourself, but it’s amusing to see all the shenanigans his mastodon gets up to before the end. While you won’t actually learn much about mastodons from ¡Más te vale, Mastodonte!, it’s still makes for a great book for young readers, whether they are reading on their own, or out loud with their parents. My family has gotten a lot of enjoyment out of this book, and I’m sure yours will too! (For an easy reading book that does have scientific information about mastodons, check out the Cat-in-the-Hat book Once Upon A Mastodon! For more Spanish language books, check out my reviews of Dinosaurios Bebés and Titanosaur.)

Since I mentioned the social media hubbub at the beginning of this review, I’ll suppose I should share mine here. My Mastodon account can be found at https://sauropods.win/@DinoDadReviews, while my Twitter is @dinodadreviews. You can also follow me on Instagram (also as @dinodadreviews) as well.