The illustrations by Monika Filipina Trzpil are beautifully imaginative – muted colors and quirky lines make for great facial expressions, and although I won't give away the solution to Kiki's tangle, I can tell you that Trzpil's imagining of an angry mom is inspired.

The interactions are pretty muted, too, which I prefer – my daughter stayed interested in the story instead of madly tapping the screen looking for bells and whistles. The music, like the illustrations, is soft and rather soothing – my daughter spent quite some time exploring this app, and I found it created a nice soundtrack while I sorted laundry.

If you're like me and you think a British accent classes up pretty much anything, you'll enjoy the narration, which can be heard in a woman's voice, a girl's voice, or not at all. My daughter, who isn't quite reading on her own yet, likes the idea of the iPad "reading her a story." Older kids might prefer to turn off the voice and read at their own pace.

My daughter managed to find the twenty hidden hairbrushes throughout the story, which allowed her to unlock a bonus game, which turned out to be a fairly ho-hum jigsaw puzzle of an illustration from the story. The app can be reset so that little readers can find the hairbrushes all over again, or so new readers can enjoy the game. Digital Leaf's last e-book featured this same bonus game – I hope they'll consider moving on to something new in their next outing.

Some technical issues I'd like to see fixed in order to make this a truly top-notch app:

• As Heather mentioned in her review of Digital Leaf's My Monster Mayhem, the story ends on an unavoidable "share" screen, which connects the user to Facebook, Twitter, email, the developer's website, and the App Store. As the mom of a five-year-old, I'm not crazy about this. I don't want to find my kid wandering around on Facebook just because I left her alone with the iPad for ten minutes.

• The navigation is a bit wonky – on every page, I had to click the "next page" arrow twice to actually make the page turn, and even then I had to make a pit stop on a blank white "loading" page before it would take me to the next page of the story. My daughter's solution to this was just to tap the arrow like a crazy person until a page appeared. I'm guessing that isn't what the developers had in mind. 

• As we've mentioned in previous reviews of Digital Leaf products, a page index would help, too – the first time through, I didn't find all the hidden hairbrushes, and I found that going back to hunt for them was a bit cumbersome.

• Although the story is narrated, the screen directions are not. This was enough to keep my daughter from using the app completely independently. The developer might want to consider making the screen directions audible for younger users.