Autumn isn’t far away and in fact we have a quite unexpected wave of almost fall-like cold weather here in Germany, so the arrival of the latest LEGO Friends magazine and the subject it covers seems oddly appropriate and timely.
That subject is for all intents and purposes the life of those wonderfully adorable little creatures called squirrels. Their cuteness is almost irresistible and of course the comic plays heavily on that. On the bright side it also makes amends by showing how potentially in danger those little critters are.
To that end they are even including an info page, which is something rare in the Friends world. It’s only the most superficial facts, though, but something is better than nothing.
Continuing the theme is a crafting page where you’re supposed to make use of that good old toilet paper roll. It’s a bit odd in that they expect you to color it with paint while at the same time including pre-printed eyes, hands and a tail. Not only would it have been better to include those on the inner side of the stronger rear cover page, but perhaps it would also have been better had they included a matching body fold & cut pattern then.
Even though the coloring page picks up the horse riding from the comic, a squirrel is nowhere to be seen here, making this one of the few pages not depicting one of the small rodents.
Similar to last time, I wish they’d just leave out the tacky renderings of the girls from these types of posters entirely to make them more appealing. I mean they have a group shot of four girls on the front poster, did they really have to do it here?
As you would expect with the squirrel being front and center in this issue, the buildable extra also has one of them. It’s in itself nothing special, even if the old Elves/ Friends mold only recently has reappeared with new prints after being AWOL for a few release cycles. The small hut is based on the protective “bird house” from the comic and perfectly serviceable. I was pleasantly surprised by the two inverted slopes in Dark Orange, because so far they have only appeared in two other sets and also the flower blossoms in regular Yellow, which are still hugely outnumbered by their Bright Light Orange peers and thus kind of rare-ish. The two acorns and the mushroom are also nice additions.
Overall this is definitely one of the more pleasing editions of the LEGO Friends magazine, mostly owing to the consistent topic throughout. It’s much more enjoyable than some others which were rather higgledy-piggledy and tried to cram in too much. It’s also noteworthy that there is actually enough “real” activities here to keep your kid busy for some hours, making those 4 Euro a worthwhile investment overall.
Mylenium's Brick Corner 