In a celebration of the relationship between father and son, this story tells the classic story of a boy who is stalling going to sleep at the end of his bedtime story: he tells his dad he loves him, and when his dad confirms he loves him, too, the son goes on to say he loves dad three.  Once they reach the number five, the son moves on to other descriptors, declaring he loves his dad more than the toys in the toy box, more than all the flowers of summer, more than all the fishes in the sea….  Each time Dad insists he loves Son more and tells him yet again to go to sleep.  Eventually Dad falls asleep, and it’s the son who does the tucking in.  My only critique is that there seems to be a bit of a disconnect in mood between the text (rather sentimental and mushy) and the illustrations (more bright and cheerful and cute).

What a delightful, charming, inspiring picture book biography!  It tells of the childhood of Clara Barton, describing her relationship with her older brother and detailing several experiences that served to nurture her interest in nursing, culminating in an accident which nearly took her beloved brother’s life, and left him in a depression from which Clara helped him recover.  An author’s note in the back goes on to describe Clara’s later years and her societal contributions as founder of the American Red Cross, as well as the author’s own family connection to this great lady.

As is fully explained in an afterword at the back of the book, the text is made up of the words to an old folk song with German origins.  The charming illustrations create characters and a setting which expand on the words of the song to round out the story:  that of two bears on a fishing trip, when the younger bear notices a hole in the bait bucket and pesters the older bear about what is to be done, but since the older bear is more absorbed in the fishing than the bothersome questions of her companion, the bait escapes before the problem is resolved.

With only a few words on each page, and much repetition, this is definitely targeting very young children.  It begins by listing many scary sounds a young boy may hear, before describing his coping strategy of sitting down, closing his eyes, and telling the scary to go away, and then lists all the joyous things he sees around him as he goes on his way.  The illustrations are childlike and support the text.  It’s okay, but there’s not really enough substance to the text to rate it an actual recommendation.

It’s one of those books that combines fiction with non-fiction:  on one level it a a fictional picture book telling the story of a dog who is invited to visit the international space station as part of a program to honor Laika, the Russian dog who was the first living creature to travel in space.  As the story goes along describing Max’s fictional training and experiences on his adventure, extensive sidebars on each page describe the facts supporting/inspiring that part of the story.  The illustrations are detailed and realistic, contributing to the educational nature of the story.

Though the title implies it’s a Christmas story, it’s really a story about the challenges of moving far away and adjusting to a new culture.  The story opens as Eduardo and his family leave their village to move to a new home, where football means something different.  As he wonders when he will ever feel at home, his uncle gives him some signs of the passing of time to watch for as they wait for Christmas: hills turning the color of the sun, pumpkins smiling, and trees riding on cars.  Though these ideas seem strange to Eduardo, he does indeed see each come to pass, indicating it is finally time to open his treasured Christmas box, containing the nativity figures he carved with his grandfather.  Connecting his past traditions with his present location finally helps him feel at home.

A beautiful picture book, recounting a little know, but important bit of American slavery history, this story tells the tale of the beginning of the end of slavery in Massachusetts.  During the days of the American Revolution, Mumbet worked as a “servant for life,” in the home of Colonel John Ashley of Berkshire County, Massachusetts.  In the course of her work, she was able to overhear the words of the declaration of independence and the new Massachusetts Constitution, and was able to turn the words of freedom and equality on her own situation, suing for and winning her freedom.  According to the author’s note in the back, two years after Mumbet won her freedom, slavery was declared unconstitutional throughout Massachusetts, and freedom was granted to all slaves in the state.

It’s a wordless book, showing a young girl picking up a single line and wiggling it into assorted shapes from her imagination.  I know the artwork is meant to look child-like, but it really just looks kinda sloppy and gray and unattractive, with lots of smudge marks across the whole thing.

A cute story of cooperation, it’s got a lot of repetition in the text, which gives it the flavor of a folk tale that might have been handed down by word of mouth, and makes it good for beginning readers.  It tells of a group of animals who are trying to reach the moon to take a taste:  One animal after another finds it just out of reach, and calls upon another animal to climb on it’s back, until there is a whole tower of animals.  The moon, thinking it is a game, keeps moving out of reach, until it grows bored with the game and decides the small mouse at the top of the tower can’t do too much damage, so he lets the mouse take a taste, which he shares with the others.  A fish who watches the whole thing can’t imagine why the others are all working so hard to reach the moon in the sky, when there’s another so much handier in the water.

I absolutely love the illustrations in this book:  they evoke the mood, create the setting, and give personality to the characters.  The story itself is a nice tale of a young harbor cat who listens to the stories of the old cat who’s travelled the sea.  When young Jim insists he wants to share in such adventures, the two set off together to stow away on a sea-going boat.  And adventures they find, including seasickness and rats and waves and storms.  When they do make it safely back to the harbor young Jim is ready to return to the safety and familiarity of the harbor, but the old cat says he’s had enough of land and is setting out on one last voyage.  By the end of the story Jim has become the old cat telling of stories of adventures at sea to the younger kittens on shore.  My biggest gripe with this book (keeping it from getting a better rating) is not with the author or the illustrator, but with the editor/publisher — whoever it was who decided on the text layout.  Someone made the decision that the lines of text should be aligned along their centers, giving it the look of poetry, though it’s not, which interferes with having any proper paragraph indentations to show when their is a change in speaker: the result is that there are times when confusion over who is speaking interrupts the flow of the dialogue and the story.

Bright, vivid illustrations accompany this cajun version of the folktale of The Fisherman and his Wife.  Something about the text draws one into feeling the urge to attempt a cajun accent while reading the story of the poor but happy fisherman and his wife who one day catch a magic catfish.  Though the fisherman is content enough, his wife comes up with more elaborate wish after another to ask of the magic fish, each granted wish leading to more wants, until having all her wishes granted land her in ruin and she realizes there’s nothing she really needs.  A brief glossary at the end offers explanations for the Bayou lingo sprinkled throughout, though context is usually sufficient to make the meaning clear.  It’s a fun read, which gives the reader something to ponder.

It’s a rather odd little story about a family having guests to dinner in the middle of a rain storm.  When a crocodile arrives unexpectedly, he is invited to join the party, and proceeds to calmly eat each of the guests (who, granted, were not terribly polite), and then goes away again.  The illustrations do not particularly enhance the strange story,  as they appear half-finished.

Definitely a book for the very youngest students.  It’s got lots of repetition and rhythm and the illustrations support the text, which makes it useful for beginning readers.  It would also be helpful for building enthusiasm for a reluctant swimmer about to face lessons:  it consists of repeated phrases describing different aspects of swimming, interspersed with the mantra, “Learn to swim!”

A small book, written for early learners, it’s got color photos illustrating the two sentences per page which describe what coins the child in the picture has, and how much cents that equals.  It’s broken into chapters by type of coin. It’s got other text features of non-fiction books (table of contents, glossary, index). It’s not that it’s a bad book.  It’s just that there’s not much practical point to it:  no child is going to choose it for the fun of reading, and it’s not particularly necessary as a teaching tool, as actual money that children can handle would work better, so I don’t know that teachers would find the book particularly helpful.

The illustrations are fun, and the colors are bright and rich.  The text is written with good rhythm and rhyme, telling the story of a young squirrel whose mother sends him off with a shopping list, insisting that the most important item on the list is cheese, as she’s planning to make pizza for dinner.  When Simon Squirrel and his friends see the moon, they declare that everyone knows it’s made of cheese, so they borrow a hot air balloon to go fetch some, but a comet blows them off course, so they end up shopping for the other items on their list at various planets.  After a meteor shower punctures their balloon they head home, but realize they still forgot the cheese.  Though it lacks enough purpose or cohesion to rate a recommendation, it’s silly and fun and kids would enjoy it.

I thought it was really rather lame.  It didn’t really seem to flow very well.  It’s about a girl who really wants a dog but can’t have one because she’s allergic.  In the winter she makes a dog out of snow (and for some reason kids laugh and tell her there’s no such thing as a snow dog, but they don’t seem to have any kind of reaction when it comes to life and starts following her around).  Similar scenarios repeat each season as she makes a dog out of flower blossoms in spring and sand in the summer and leaves in the fall.  For some unknown reason, although the snow and sand dogs look pretty much the same in their live forms as they started out, the leaf and flower dogs stop looking like they’re made from leaves or flowers when they come to life.

It pains me to say it, as I’ve really enjoyed other books in this series and other books by this author, but I was disappointed with this book.  It’s like it never really committed to deciding what it was meant to be about.  It’s a little about labor unrest of the time, a little about attitudes towards the mentally handicapped, a little about the rights of women and animals, and a little about the great Chicago fire.  It’s got good characters and I started out enjoying it, but it never seemed to develop any kind of focus or purpose; it just sort of rambled on for a bit, and then there was an epilogue tacked on the end to wrap up the loose ends, but there was never any kind of actual conclusion.

A delightful story of the hidden world of mice that mirrors that of humans.  Set during the jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria, the basic premise of the tale supposes that for every human job, there is a mouse with the same job, scurrying about in the hidden spaces, staying away from human eyes.  The hero of this story grew up in the Mews outside Buckingham Palace, but has never been given a proper name, as no one seems to know his parentage:  he is simply called according to the distinctive shape his tail falls into.  A series of scrapes and adventures amidst the flurry of castle preparations for the grand celebration eventually lead the the revelation of his true identity.

It’s big on the cool factor, with lots of color photos of cool cars, and lots of data on different cars from different years, just the kind of thing my brother has always loved to read, and I’m sure it will be a hit with the boys.  It nearly got a “Recommended” rating, but for a gripe I had with the design of the layout:  there are all these yellow pages inserted into the body of the book, with “Smokin’ Facts.”  If the layout had been reconfigured, so that these fell between sections (or at least between paragraphs), it would’ve been better.  Falling as they do, often mid-sentence as the reader turns the page, the result is that they interrupt the readers’ flow, making for choppy reading (heck, a hyphenated word that starts on page 39 isn’t finished until page 43).

Though I’m certainly not the target audience for this book, I can certainly imagine some of my boys thinking it’s really cool.  And they’ll actually be getting some solid information into the bargain.  This little volume does a clear job of describing the history of drag racing and explaining the differences between different types of cars and events.  It nearly got a “Recommended” rating, but for some gripes I had with the design of the layout:  there are all these yellow pages inserted into the body of the book, with “Smoking Facts.”  if the layout had been reconfigured, so that these fell between sections (or at least between paragraphs), it would’ve been better.  Falling as they do, often mid-sentence as the reader turns the page, the result is that they interrupt the readers’ flow, making for choppy reading.

Even though it’s only got a couple sentences of simple text per page, accompanied by full-color photographs that support that text, this little book does a surprisingly good job of concisely explaining, in step-by-step fashion, how big sturdy trees get turned into thin, flimsy paper.  It’s got all your basic non-fiction text features, it’s designed to be held by small hands, and it’s got a sturdy binding, too.

Though it may not be a hot topic for kids to pick up for casual reading, as a tool to support the curriculum, this book is packed with solid information.  The layout is attractively designed, with plenty of photos and diagrams to support the text, and the text itself is broken up enough into manageable blurbs to keep it from being intimidating.  The concepts contained in this book (different types of energy, different modes of transferring energy, different sources of energy) are ones that I remember being quite confused about clear until I got to college, this book is quite clearly written, giving concrete examples.

I’m not exactly sure what the purpose of this book is.  If it is trying to be informative about life in a circus, the depth of knowledge it offers is really quite shallow.  If it is trying to illustrate how to write a diary (which is kind of suggestion by the two-page spread in the back offering tips on “Writing a Diary”), then it’s modeling bad writing: this is reported to be the diary of a grown man, but he’s writing in very short, choppy sentences, showing no evidence of personal voice or fluency.  Also, even though this is supposedly a diary, written in first person, the photos used to illustrate the book keep showing a different guy.

The illustrations certainly are striking (if sometimes a bit puzzling, as to their links to the stories).  If you’ve got a large folktale collection and want a variety of editions for comparison’s sake, this one could be a nice addition.  If however you are limited in how many fable volumes you can have, I think I would recommend looking elsewhere.  This volume does contain some of the classics, such as The Tortoise and Hare and The Lion and the Mouse, but several of the selections are a bit obscure.  One of the defining characteristics of a fable is that they typically include a moral or a lesson they are trying to impart, but several of these left me wondering just what the point was supposed to be.

Dinosaurs are always a hit, and the illustrations in this one are certainly eye-catching, but what makes this one a real gem is that it tells the story of how those illustrations came to be — how our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown over time as new evidence is discovered, and how scientific illustrators piece together available evidence, and extrapolate from it to create the images we see of these long-ago creatures which no one ever has actually seen.  I think it’s important for students to learn that scientific understanding (heck, most understanding for that matter) is not static, but is based in evidence, and changes as new evidence comes to light.