Cozy Stickers: My Little Cozy Home

This tiny activity book will delight people who love cute characters such as kittens, bunnies and pandas, have a knack for visual puzzles, and have good eye-hand coordination.

The book is small and portable, about the size of a sheet of origami paper. It includes 800 tiny stickers, five ‘scenes’ next to five background layouts, and a pair of pointed tweezers.

The scenes are a living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and a garden complete with a swimming pool. In each scene, the wee characters are busy living their lives –  climbing stairs, reading a book, watering plants, or nibbling pizza, for example. In the kitchen – which looks more like a restaurant – a little bear reaches for a bottle from a well-stocked wine cabinet. The characters seem to be very comfortable with each other: in the bathroom, while one uses their laptop in the bathtub, another takes a shower, and their friend is doing the laundry.

As well as the characters, the stickers include furniture and fences, plants and trees, mirrors, lights and other home accessories.

For each scene, the aim is to find the matching stickers and recreate the scene on the background by carefully placing the stickers one by one using the tweezers. Peeling the stickers off the sheet takes a certain amount of dexterity and the tweezers are sharp. The book advises that it is suitable for people aged 14 and up.

It’s not clear to me what someone would do with the book once all the stickers had been placed, although perhaps a corresponding story could be made up to go with each scene. For those with a creative streak, there’s no need to recreate the scenes exactly. The stickers could be placed in any order on any one of the backgrounds, or on other surfaces (such as notebooks) too.

Although the book appears reasonably substantial, about two-thirds of the interior is taken up by the thick cardboard housing the tweezers.

This might be a good activity for a road trip, a waiting room, or an indoor weekend. If placing the stickers is fun and engaging, look out for other books in the series, such as My Little Shops.

Reviewer: Anne Kerslake Hendricks

Murdoch Books