Review Detail

The Museum of Shapes

Kids Indie 390

Art isn't All Square

October 17, 2025 (Updated: June 23, 2026)

Overall rating

3.8

Plot

3.0

Characters

4.0

Writing Style

4.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

4.0

Alma is the curator for the Museum of Shapes. Along with her dog, Max, she decides which shapes go into the museum, as well as how different collections of shapes will be displayed. We are introduced to many shapes, starting with the simple point. There are shapes with different numbers of sides, some with curved lines, and some that are three dimensional. There are even shapes that are blobby and silly, like oak leaves and a splat of ink. Alma arranges all of the shapes and has a grand opening for the museum that is echoed in all of the shapes in the night sky. I loved the author's note at the end telling us that Alma's museum is based on the real Museum of Concrete Art and Design in Ingolstadt, Germany!

Good Points

This has a little more math involved than many basic books about shapes. There is good information about lines joining points and creating angles, which is a good introduction to geometry. The inclusion of the base of a pyramid and a cube being the same was interesting, as was the concept that three dimensional shapes cast shadows! Any introduction to numbers, geometrical concepts, or math is great for young learners. I only wish that there had been a little more about fractions, since I know how much some students struggle with these concepts even in middle school!

The illustrations are bright and simple, but Max is patterned the same as the brick building. There are plenty of opportunities for young readers to identify and point out different shapes; I particularly like the page that states that most objects are made up of a variety of shapes! Breaking a toy truck into a square, a rectangle, and circles is really good practice.

This felt a bit like Walsh's Mouse Shapes, and also goes well with Cornille's Big, Little: A Book of Opposites, Boldt's Colors vs. Shapes, Oikawa and Takeuchi's Circle, Triangle, Elephant and Miranda and Comstock's Tangled. Of course, now I'm wondering what happened to the cardboard cylinder of wooden blocks I had as a child; I know that my grandson will need blocks like that when reading The Museum of Shapes!