Please

These are four titles in the Mind Your Manners series, but if courtesy is an overlooked arena for parental instruction, simple example may serve the cause more aptly. Each of these board books contains 12 phrases and scenes demonstrating the correct use of the ""magic words.'' But the pictures are wooden and the phrases redundant; since a sentence that begins ``may I'' generally has a ``please'' in it, readers could get confused about which book teaches what. They'll probably also get bored; these books are little more than drills, with no scrap of story or plot to hold a child's attention. (26)