The illustrations in this book are amazing!  Strong enough to earn a recommendation all on their own.  To be honest, I found the story that accompanies them to be a bit convoluted and hard to follow, but there’s something so magical about the illustrations that I’m left feeling like my failure to follow the tale is somehow a lacking of imagination on my part.  It tells of a boy (at first called Nightlight, and later Jack Frost), who is best friends with the Man in the Moon and has sword an oath to the parents of the Man in the Moon to watch over and protect him, but after a battle with a nightmare, he falls to earth and seems to lose his way for a while, but the Man in the Moon remembers their friendship and keeps watch and eventually brings him out of his loneliness, by helping him to remember his oath, which he ends up turning toward the children of earth, and gives him purpose.  Interestingly, the book jacket recommends it for kids ages 4-8, but I thought it was more for older children, a picture book suitable for ages 8-12.  I think it takes the older kids to be able to follow the story, but maybe it takes the littler kids to lose themselves in it?

Wow!  I love this book! Completely cool and fabulous and amazing.  Gives me the shivers.  Must get the rest in this series.  The illustrations are incredible, drawing on imagination and shifts in perspective to gradually guide the eye to two completely different pictures at once, depending on what part of the art you are looking at, but not like those cheesy black and white optical illusion things; more like an attention to detail and focus exercise.  While the artwork is the main draw, the text which accompanies it is poetical and draws one in even more to ponder the world of imagination.  The poems and the artwork each add to the other.  With young children, they’ll be drawn into the beauty and fun and the magic of it, but I think for older audiences there’s also things to be gained from this to be shared in art classes and poetry classes, too.

I recommend this one with reservations.  Consider your audience.  It tells the true story of a boy and woman in New York who struck up a friendship after young Alex asked for spare change on a street corner, and Laura shared a meal with him instead.  They began having weekly meals together and Laura invites Alex to spend Christmas with her and her family.  It’s written from Alex’s point of view, but the focus seems to be on how kind and generous and wonderful Laura is.  As a story to share with middle-class kids to encourage them to reach out to those less fortunate, showing that even small acts can build strong relationships and make big differences, I think it’s great.  But I wonder how students who are living in poverty will feel reading it, wondering why they haven’t had someone swoop down and offer them all these things?  For that matter, the story tells us that Alex has two sisters and a grandmother and mom, but there’s no mention of any of them being invited to participate in Laura’s generosity? One wonders how they felt about that.

A nearly wordless book, the story is mostly told through the pictures, but the connecting thread running through the whole book is a single word accompanying each picture, and as the reader proceeds through the story, that single word changes by just a single letter each time (plan, plane, planet, plant…until it circles all the way back to plan again).  The chain of words provides a wonderful way for young students to consider word structure, and how that single letter changes the word, and the illustrations turn this chain of words, that would otherwise be connected by nothing else, into a story of a young girl and her dog on a farm, who find a photo album telling the story of the old bi-plane in the yard, and cook up a plan to resurrect it with her father to bring it back to new adventures.  It even manages poignancy within the simple tale, as the word pain is accompanied by the illustration showing the family laying flowers at mom’s grave in remembrance.

The illustrations are classic De Paola, and the environmentalist message is certainly as relevant now as it was when it was originally published in 1975, but it’s an odd little story.  Never once is any reference made to explain why Michael is a Bird-Boy, who wakes up every morning and puts on a bird suit.  And when he complains to the boss-lady about all the smoke her factory is producing, she had simply never considered where she could get real bees, and presto-chango everything is better.  I don’t think DePaola’s illustrations are enough to carry it.  I think there’s a reason why this one hadn’t surfaced with all his other classics in the last forty years.

Apparently the sequel trend is not a new phenomenon, as this one was originally published in 1954.  Not sure why it’s been under wraps for more than 60 years, but it might have needed the new updated illustrations to bring it up to snuff.  I tend to be a bit suspicious of sequels, but I like this one.  It’s written by the original author of the original story, and shares the same style of being written in rhyming couplets.  There are a few times when the rhyme is a bit awkward, but I like the story:  it picks up in the preparation for another Christmas, when the other reindeer are jealous of Rudolph’s fame and have started to turn on him, so he is feeling left out.  He gets so depressed his nose goes out, and seeing himself as now of no use, he heads out, sad and lonely, on his own.  While wandering in the woods, he comes across a family of rabbits who have lost two of their little ones, so he sets out to help.  Forced to rely on his other skills (sniffing and listening), he still manages to find the lost rabbits, just in time to save them from the prowling wolves.  Upon reflections, he realizes that others have problems much bigger than his, and even without his glow he was able to be of help, so maybe he can still be of help to Santa.  And on the way home, through fog of course, having abandoned his whining and weeping and thinking of others, his glow comes back, and he returns to find the other deer sorry for their pranks, welcoming him home. It’s nicely sentimental  for the season, and has a good message.

The series is a popular one, and kids will gravitate to the familiar character.  The rhyme helps build literacy skills.  The situation is one that many students can relate to:  little Llama is going on his first overnight sleepover at his grandparents’ house, but he leaves his treasured stuffed llama in the car, which leaves him feeling nervous.  When he finally confesses, grandpa comes to the rescue by sharing his own special toy from when he was young, emphasizing the point that we all were young once, we all get scared at times, and we all cling to our special somethings.  Literature snobs may cringe at the poor grammar, as the whole thing is written in sentence fragments, but as my high school English teacher told us, once you know the rules well enough to break them intentionally, you’re allowed.

This is a fabulous little book for young children.  I think it’s got all the makings of a classic:  it’s got the rhythm and rhyme and repetition that is so helpful with emergent readers; the illustrations support and extend the text, and set readers up for opportunities to make predictions.  And besides, it’s fun:  the rhythm is catchy; the pictures are cute; the situation (a dog venturing forth to explore beyond his yard, and then getting spooked, and deciding home is best — a little like Goin’ on a Bear Hunt) is one that kids can relate to.  Even though it’s audience may be limited to the very young, I still highly recommend it.

Both beautiful and informative, this non-fiction picture book describes physical traits and behaviors and challenges faced by all bears, and it also dedicates a two-page spread to each of the eight species of bears.  For each species it gives the scientific name, common names, size, as well as detailed descriptions of the habitat, features and behaviors specific to that species.  The beautiful illustrations support the text and draw the curious eye.  A world map in the back indicates where each species lives, and a habitat glossary uses illustrations as well as words to explain the terminology of land features.

Beautiful watercolor illustrations combine with informative text to tell the story of train travel across The United States.  Starting with the fluster of activity on the platforms of an eastern urban train station as a commuter train gets ready to pull out, the story describes the actions of conductors and passengers and the passing views until it reaches another station where we see a passenger train just pulling out to cross the country-side.  Again we get a full description of events and sounds and sights until it pulls into a midwestern city, where we meet a freight train.  And so it goes until the overnight train crosses the Rocky Mountains and encounters a high-speed train heading into a new urban station on the west coast.  Besides being informative about all different kinds of trains, it’s a lovely example of descriptive detail.  Like a virtual cross-country field trip.

A good story, with believable characters facing real-life situations that a lot of kids can relate to.  The story is told from the perspective of its 10-year-old main character, Piper Lee DeLuna.  Piper’s mom is getting ready to get married again, but Piper is not too happy about it, partly because she’s not especially fond of the girl about to become her stepsister, partly because she doesn’t want to give up the hope that her father might still be alive (his body was never recovered from a plane crash), and partly because she doesn’t want to share her mom.  Throughout the story, Piper makes  a lot of not-so-smart decisions that lead to near disasters, but because it’s told from her perspective the reader gets to see why they all seemed like reasonable ideas at the start, until they never turn out the way she’d hoped.

The writing is stilted. The story is boring. The pictures are fine, if a little bit drab in their color scheme.  It’s like a junior graphic novel, telling of two friends going trick-or-treating.  One is too scared at first, but her buddy assures her that her costume does not need to be a scary one; along the way their bike gets a flat tire at a haunted house, but a ghost helps them repair it, so they make it to their party.

It’s well-constructed, and well-formatted.  That is, it’s got a good sturdy binding and all the important non-fiction text features like index, glossary, map, labels… It’s got nearly-full-page color illustrations that support the text.  I just wish it was better written: one page tells us “some rivers flow down to the ocean,” while another says, “The water flows into the ocean,” which sounds both redundant and contradictory.  Don’t all rivers flow into the ocean (unless they’ve been run dry by over-use before they reach it)? One page tells us, “A river is like a waterslide.”  Without any elaboration/explanation.  Did we really need a whole page dedicated to telling us that, “Rivers are full of water.” ?

The simple text is well-supported by color photos of people from all around the world, showing lots of different types of clothing.  It tells about the different reasons people wear clothes, and describes different types of clothes, as well as telling that some people make their own clothes while others buy theirs.  A map in the back highlights where different photos were taken.  It includes a basic glossary (with photos) and index, and it’s got a really good binding.

It’s sweet.  It’s got those classic David McPhail illustrations.  It lists a whole lot of ways that brothers sometimes differ and sometimes disagree, but they find ways to resolve problems and accept each others differences, and some things they have in common, but no matter what they know they’ll always stick together.  Not so much a story as a sentimental treatise on what it means to be brothers.

It’s just kinda lame.  It rhymes.  It’s a list of farm animals who don’t like doing what the author says they should; they all like doing other stuff.  The only normal thing they’re all good at is sleeping.

The story is one with a good message about not giving up on one’s dreams, as well as one a lot of little girls can probably relate to.  There’s this little bunny who loves to twist and jump and whoosh around her bedroom and really wants to be a ballet dancer, but when she makes the effort to pursue lessons she meets repeated folks who insist there are no bunnies in the ballet.  With persistence she sticks with it, and with the help of one instructor who believes in her she makes it to the the dance of the sugar plum fairy in the Nutcracker, and astounds them all.  Some of the illustrations are really fun and appealing, but they seem a bit inconsistent — some look sloppy and ill executed and off-putting.

It’s got a lot of good information (including current events as recent as 2012), and some great color photos and maps.  I just wish it was a little better organized.  It goes from talking about modern Egypt, to its history, and the back to modern life, and then back to history again.  And given that a lot of terminology may be unfamiliar to young readers from other parts of the world,  it could’ve made better use of photos/illustrations to support the text.  For example, on the page talking about the plants and animals of the region, it includes a full-page color photo of a crocodile (a fairly common animal most kids could picture themselves), and includes nothing to illustrate the ibexes, papyruses or lotuses mentioned in the text. And of course the timeline is not really a timeline, but a flowchart of history.

On the one hand, it’s about a little-known (at least I had never heard of her before) woman in science, from an era when few women were encouraged to pursue such things.  Our kids need to know more about such folks.  I could wish it was better done, though.  It is illustrated with photos from the time (yay, primary sources), but they don’t necessarily do much to support the text.  Because it is written for small children, the text itself is a bit dry, though clear and understandable.  Pet peeve:  it tries to construct a timeline of her life as it goes, but it pays no attention to the spacing along the line as representative of time (there’s more space between the markers separated by one year than there is between those separated by 24 years).

Seriously?  Who is going to want to read this book? Every library has a better way to spend $18.  At least the last two pages of the text finally explain, “That’s how I do my homework.  How would you do it?” Because the beginning seems to imply a lot of assumptions about what homework entails.  And it’s rather stereotypical to picture an Asian child as the example demonstrating good study habits.  But the biggest problem is that it’s just plain boring and pedantic.

A good, solid, age-appropriate science text for early learners: it uses simple text, and uses color photos well to support that text.  It manages to make some big vocabulary clearly understandable (opaque, translucent, transparent).  It uses examples that will be readily familiar to small children to make its  points. And it’s got a good sturdy binding, too.

It’s got a good sturdy binding, but it’s pretty useless for teaching kids the vocabulary it’s trying to teach.  The only page that tells what words mean is the two-age dictionary spread in the back, which kids aren’t going to look at.  The main body of the book has some lovely color photos of smiling people, labeled with French family terminology, but there are not clues in either the text or the photos to indicate who these people are, other than age and gender. Parents, aunt, uncle, and stepparents are pretty indistinguishable, as are cousins, siblings, and friends.  Demi-soeur is listed in the dictionary as stepsister, but given what I know about complicated families and word origins, it makes me wonder whether the French use the same word for both stepsister and half-sister??

I love the illustrations.  They are absolutely charming and sweet, but I’m afraid the story doesn’t match up.  It’s a rather long, babbling story about a housewife quail and her day with her seven chicks, hiding under a bush to stay cool, preparing for a picnic, visiting their aunt, taking a bath, and going to bed.  For some unknown reason the text occasionally changes color, but there doesn’t seem to be any discernible pattern as to why.  There’s just nothing about it to make the reader care about what the quails are up to.

There’s not enough information in this volume to give it any real substance.  It is basically a chronological list of the first computers, with dates and names of inventors.  The full-page photos that accompany the text are useful, but the one showing the computer invented in 1975 is sitting on a shelf with a 2001 edition book. And once again we have book including a “timeline” in which the spacing along the line is completely misrepresentative of the time involved.

The illustrations are fun, but the story is a bit flat.  It basically show’s Nina following her ears through the woods, each sound leading her to a new group of friends who is up to something, but they all seem to be acting a bit strange/secretive.  In the end, she hears them all gathering for a surprise party for her birthday.  Basically it seems like a story that’s already been done, without something to make it stand out from the crowd.