The binding is great.  The full-page color photos are fabulous.  But the information is a bit shallow and rather strangely organized.  Each page offers two to three sentences about a different animal that happens to be green.  There’s no real consistency about the type of information offered on each animal.  It doesn’t specifically focus on how their greenness is significant, though a sentence in the back of the book does state that mostly green is used for camouflage.

The illustrations are really cute, but the story falls a bit flat.  As a bunch of kids set off to trick-or-treat, one of the little girls is startled to notice the moon is disappearing (behind some clouds).  Her big brother (?) declares that he, as Sorcerer of Space, is the only one who can save the moon.  Gretchen tags along as his sidekick and together they climb a ladder to the moon and discover that it is being eaten by jack-o-lanterns, from which they save it before returning to trick-or-treating. Not much of anything in the way of character development.

It begins with a porcupine having a picnic, eating some clover.  Then a series of random animals ask to join him, to which he is agreeable, but none of them ever want to share his clover. Instead they say what they will eat instead.  The final animal invited to join the picnic is a tiger, and when asked what he will eat, he declares, “all of you!” and that’s when the story ends.  The pictures are cute (big eyes on giraffe), but the ending is a bit startling, and may freak out some kids.  A final information page at the end does explain that this story couldn’t really happen because the animals come from all different places, but nobody ever reads that part.  There’s a lot of repetition in the text, but not really consistently enough to make it predictable for emergent readers.

A reasonable choice if you are looking for early readers about ocean animals.  The binding is sturdy.  The text is simple and direct. It’s got full-color photos and all the usual non-fiction text features.  It’s nature as an early reader puts some limits on the depth of information included, but it’s not completely wimpy in this regard.  One flaw I think young students would find confusing is on the pages where it is trying to show the lengths of the smallest and longest seahorses in comparison to other everyday objects:  the illustrations and the information don’t coincide — the smallest seahorse is described as .5 inches, in comparison to a penny, labeled as .75 inches, and yet the picture of the seahorse is bigger than the picture of the penny; the pictures of the smallest and largest seahorses (labeled as .5 inches and 12 inches, respectively, compared to a penny and a basketball respectively), are identical in size. Little kids will be confused by this.

Set in Boston in 1959, this story is told from the perspective of a young African American boy who is waiting to see his favorite baseball team, the Red Sox become integrated, and the joy he and his family felt when Pumpsie Green took to the field.  An author’s note in the back points out that it took 12 years after Jackie Robinson for all the professional baseball teams to open their ranks to blacks.  It shares a bit about the racism he and his family experienced at the ball park, too.  It certainly has a place, sharing a bit of history that tends to be overlooked.  I would have liked it better if it shared more about Pumpsie himself.

I admit I’m biased:  I pretty much love all Steve Jenkins’ books.  The one limitation of this one is that it is limited to very young students.  It is set up as a guessing book: a two page spread illustrates many features of a particular animal and asks, “Who Am I?” and the following two page spread answers the question, showing an illustration of the whole animal.  The guessing part is really targeting PreK-K kids, as the features given as clues make the guessing pretty obvious.  The predictability and illustrations to support the text extend the usefulness to emergent readers in first grade.  There are some information pages in the back that add a little more meat to the substance offered on each animal.

It’s one of those how-to-adapt-to-a-new-baby-in-the-house stories. Leon is not sure where his new little brother is going to fit in their lives:  can’t be on mom’s lap, as there’s only room for Leon there; can’t be in mama’s arms (they’re just the right size for cuddling him, so obviously too big to cuddle a tiny baby); can’t be between mom and dad while holding hands (Leon holds both); can’t be on dad’s shoulders like Leon (baby’s too tiny).  After much hemming and hawing, Leon is about to conclude they have no place to put a new baby in their home, when he realizes his own arms are just the right size to snuggle a baby.  The illustrations are simple and child-like.

The illustrations are gorgeous — rich, saturated jewel tones.  The story is told in rhyme, beginning in the ancient days of cathedral building, describing the purpose of gargoyles to stand watch and keep evil spirits away, before fast-forwarding to the days when folks had forgotten the original purpose of the gargoyles, seeing them as ugly demons.  As the story continues, we see how hurt the gargoyles are when they overhear what people think of them, but we see too that angels see the gargoyles’ pain, and venture near to ease it.  One stormy night the angels come help the gargoyles take flight over the earth below, where they see others who feel lonely, but they are able to see that they aren’t truly alone:  each seemingly unwanted soul is being loved and guided and cherished by an angel of his/her own.  I do have one gripe with this book.  I’m sure as an artist, the author had a very good reason for making the decision he did, but as an educator, I am frustrated that there is not one single capital letter in the entire text — a poor example for young students who struggle with proper grammar rules already.

It’s a high-interest topic (aircraft carriers), and a highly-appealing format (the hard-cover book begins with a code that matches it to an online, bilingual e-book).  The introductory page offers instructions for accessing the ebook in both languages (English and Spanish).  The rest of the text of the book is in Spanish only.  The text is simple, and well-supported by the full-page color photos.  Useful both as a tool for Spanish-speaking students who are beginning readers, as well as for those who are learning Spanish.

Ah, the power of a comma! This is a story meant to mislead until the twist at the end.  The story unfolds with the fox family tending their garden and declaring it’s time for their prize-winning rabbit stew.  As they list off all the ingredients they’ll need, the illustrations show the worried rabbit watching the foxes gather said ingredients.  And then in the end, we see that they’ve gathered all this lovely food for their favorite Rabbit, Stew, and his family too.  So it turns out Stew isn’t the main dish, but the recipients of this feast.

It’s cute and it’s relatable.  When the main character spills juice all over a chair, she’s so distressed she decides to run away to the library until she’s grown up.  On the way to the library, she meets a number of friends with their own disasters, who decide to join her. After a series of catastrophes piling up like a chain of dominoes dropping on each other, a little bird interrupts her cries of calamity to remind her that it was just an accident, which we’ve seen through the story, can happen to anyone. Instead of running away, our main character learns to apologize and make things better.

It’s a sentimental love poem offered by mother for daughter, declaring her undying love.  The illustrations begin and end with mom tucking daughter into bed.  In the in-between pages, the illustrations are fanciful: showing mother and daughter flying through the night sky on a cloud shaped like a whale, landing in a wild countryside, and scampering through a variety of landscapes that support the analogies of the poem itself.  A nice detail in the illustrations is that daughter has curly hair and a slightly darker skin tone than mom:  is this a mixed-race family?  Could be.  If so, it’s just presented as is…no big deal.

It tells the story of an often neglected bit of American history:  the role of women during WWI, who helped the farmers tend the fields when all the farm hands had gone off to fight.  It focuses on the tale of Helen Stevens, a New York college girl who wanted to do her bit, so she left the big city to join a camp in upstate New York that was training “farmerettes” to tend the jobs that needed doing.  Even after training to learn new skills, she and her friends still faced the prejudice of local farmers who didn’t think girls could do the same work as men.  They had to offer a day of work with no pay to show their worth, and still had to negotiate firmly, but prove their worth they did.

It’s a mash-up between that typically associated with attracting boys and that typically considered girlish:  fart humor plus tea parties. The illustrations are cute and frilly, showing a gathering of three little girls having a tea party in the yard with all the trimmings.  The text trying to outline the rules for tea parties, with repeated interruptions to accuse somebody of tooting, and every time the accused blames somebody else.  The final rule declared is that there’s no tooting at tea.  But just then the tea kettle toots to let them know the water is boiling, so they have to revise their rules.  It’s cute.  I may be guilty of succumbing to stereotypes, but I think it telling that it was written by a guy.

I love the illustrations. I like the idea of picture book biographies, especially more multi-cultural ones. From what I read, he certainly seems to have been a ground-breaking musician, so perhaps this book will help him become more well-known.  I know I don’t have a huge musical background, but even the illustrator mentions in his note in the back that he was unfamiliar with Esquivel’s music as well, so it makes me wonder how many of my elementary students will bother to pick it up.  I’m afraid its readership may be limited.  And one fault I think will make it harder for those who do to wrap their heads around:  there’s no indication in the body of the text to give a time frame context to the musician’s life and work.  A reader needs to read carefully in the end note (which few elementary students do) in order to place the bulk of his career in the 1960s.

It uses the universality of birthdays has a window into multiculturalism.  Right on the first page it begins by acknowledging that though everybody in the world has a birthday, not everyone celebrates, or even knows it, and those who do celebrate have many different ways of doing so.  I really like that it begins with a map, giving children a visual grounding on where each child lives.  I also really like that the writing is in first person, with each two-page spread describing how a different child celebrates his/her birthday; though it states where each child lives, and we can presume that the children chosen may represent typical examples from their home, it avoids falling into the trap of suggesting that every child in a particular country celebrates the same way, which of course would be inaccurate.  I also like that it includes examples of children who DON’T celebrate their birthdays,  which also adds to the authenticity of the book.  The one element I wish was different is this:  Each child’s story begins with a “Happy Birthday” type message in his/her own language, and in the back is a glossary which provides pronunciation guides and translations — I really wish that at least the pronunciation guide was offered within the main body of the book.

It’s shiny and bright, but that’s all it’s really got going for it. There are such better counting books available that I could not recommend spending $20 on this one.  It’s illustrated with photos of crayons on a white background, and it’s really just unabashed product placement.

It’s not exactly a traditional story, and not exactly a wordless picture book, but somewhere in between.  The text consists of a string of words, phrases, and onamonapeia (yes, I know that’s spelled wrong), which wouldn’t mean much alone.  But combined with the illustrations they tell a story of a gaggle of rambunctious Australian animals enjoying a day together filled with ordinary and familiar experiences (going to the park, playing on the playground, sharing a picnic, bath time, etc.).  It’s a celebration of the ordinary, and it invites children to play with language, and to consider adding their own words to tell the tale.

The illustrations are very textured, multi-media collage.  Each two-page spread with a close-up illustration of some bug, asking “What bug has a _____ like this?” is followed with a two-page spread that zooms out to show the full bug, in its habitat, and providing a description of how that particular body part serves that bug.  Most of the bugs will be familiar to young children, allowing them to participate in the guessing game the book invites. A paragraph in the back of the book explains the more scientific classification vocabulary, stating that all the “bugs” in the book belong to a large group of animals called Arthropods; it defines this term, along with the smaller groups (insects, arachnids, and myriapods) into which arthropods can be subdivided, thus inviting children into classification.

It’s a sentimental, somewhat romantic celebration of trains.  The illustrations are soft and a bit unfocused, to give it a nostalgic air, and the text is a poetic description of different kinds of trains doing different kinds of jobs.  The words play with language, giving it a rhythm reminiscent of the the chugging trains, and yet including a lot of vocabulary specific to the world of trains.  An illustrated glossary in the back provides illumination for unfamiliar terms.

It’s the illustrations that really make this book.  They are bright and bold and silly and they add an extra layer to the rest of the story.  Before the reader even gets to the first page of the story, the title page and lead-in pages show us a rather nerdy kid (which I say with the utmost affection and respect) toting around a book about bugs, drawing bugs, stopping to examine a bug on the sidewalk as the school bus approaches.  The story opens with this kid on the bus telling the girl next to him that he’s going to have to buy lunch in the cafeteria for the first time because his mom didn’t have time to pack him a lunch, which disturbs the busybody Ginny greatly, and she insists our hero take notes so he won’t forget the seven crucial rules to survive such an experience.  He then goes on to tell us of his experience, in which he manages to break all seven rules, but still survives.  Throughout the telling of the tale, we see him still toting his bug book, and his retelling includes many analogies in which he relates those around him to the bugs he’s been reading about, which the illustrations capture with humor.

The dynamic duo of Lester and Munsinger have teamed up again in their usual style, with cute illustrations and stories that address typical childhood problems.  This one is about a Badger who won’t go to sleep by day, like a good badger should, and so sleeps through his classes each night.  Students who are familiar with other stories by this pair will be drawn to the book by the familiar artwork, but I thought the story fell a bit flat this time.  The solution to the problem seemed to be that Boris just had to realize the fun stuff he missed when he slept through school, and then he made up his mind to go to sleep on time.  As someone who has struggled with insomnia, it’s not that simple:  even when someone really WANTS to go to sleep, sometimes they just can’t.

Tony Baloney is a very believable and relatable character, somehow managing to wrap into one Halloween all the struggles so many children struggle with in agonizing over the perfect Halloween costume:  he doesn’t want a costume patched together from odds and ends, or a hand-me-down costume from his big sister, or to have matching costumes with his younger siblings.  Instead he breaks into his savings to go buy the perfect pirate costume.  Unfortunately, he disregards the rules his teacher has set down about what is allowed at school, along with his parents’ warnings to take care of his costume if he wants it to last until Halloween.  In his enthusiasm, he ends up sabotaging himself by wearing it out before the big day and getting his sword confiscated by his teacher.  Yet in the end, he finds he’s able to put his creativity to work, with a bit of help from his family, and still have a good time in an odds-and-ends homemade pirate costume after all.

There’s nothing especially compelling about either the writing or the illustrations for this early chapter book (really still a picture book, but broken into token chapters).  But it does have a good message reminding children not to get too caught up in competition, but to put priority on friendship and being proud of our work, regardless of how it compares to that of others.

I’m certainly glad I didn’t waste any money on this book, and assuming it is an example of the rest of the series, I certainly won’t be buying any others in this series.  I’m not even sure I want to put this on my shelves for free.  The story is flat and pedantic.  The text is stilted and choppy.  It’s not even easily decodable, which sometimes excuses other stilted, choppy writing.  Our students need books that provide examples of rich, fluent language and compelling stories. I don’t see any redeeming qualities here.