(Written by the wife!)
First, I took my hubby's account--he's not into Spanish so much, but I am!
As a life-long lover of the language (I took classes in high school and college), I picked up this book because, while I love the language, I've only recently begun to take learning it seriously.
The Good: This book gives you realistic (semi-interesting) stories that focus on basic words and phrases. This was great because I was able to ACTUALLY understand around 85-90% of the story. It really sucks when you spend more time translating than reading :-(.
The Great thing about this book is the intro on HOW TO READ this book effectively--please don't skip that! The focus is more on finishing the short chapters than knowing every word: believe me, using this method you will look up fewer words, and feel more accomplished as a reader. It really is the best strategy I've ever used for reading a text in another language.
Since each chapter comes with a quick quiz (I gave up on those quickly, they were less fun and my comprehension was already solid) and a summary. I love the summaries and would often read the previous chapter summaries before I started the next just as a quick review.
It's really important to note that this book does a great job of giving you tense switches that feel realistic. Saying "I went to this cool store yesterday, do you want to go with me and then we will eat lunch somewhere else?" sounds easy, but that's three tense switches in one sentence! This book helped me get WAY better at this by having realistic scenarios where the language is used naturally (not like my pal Duolingo.com where all the sentences are isolated).
The Cons: I couldn't find a lot as a person who was craving what amounts to "grade level texts" to read. The stories are sometimes silly--but the point is to understand them and get through them--if you want complex, rich literature--you have to read the silly stuff first!
There were some words that I had to look up that weren't actually in the glossary at the end of each section--even though they were tough enough (non-high frequency) that I thought they should have been added. But again, when you read the goal should NOT be to understand EVERY word, at first.
Basically, if you want a book that will build your confidence as a reader, expose you to the most basic words and phrases in the language, plus give you a bit of a challenge (the last story gave me a workout!), then I think this book is well worth the $15 or so dollars. I totally ate up the book, lol. I will be buying #2 and then the intermediate series before trying my hand at a REAL book. They're worth the money if you want to REALLY learn the language :-)
clarke taylor
J. Mckerracher