Eh.  It’s okay.  The main character is Rhina O’Virus, and it basically tells the story of how a germ invades a body to cause a cold.  The illustrations are bright and cheerful, but not exactly informative.  The story is told in terms of buildings and copy machines and police and parties, but in order to make the connections between the story and the reality of what happens, it’s important to read the straight-forward paragraph on the last page, which mostly kids won’t read. It’s kinda hard to follow.

The illustrations are sweet.  The audience is limited.  The text is simple:  describing all the ways toddler Mimi mimics the grown ups around her, from putting on lipstick like Mommy and slurping soup like Grandpa. In the end, Grandma gives kisses just like Mimi.  It would be recommended for those catering to a pre-school audience, but will hold limited appeal for older kids.

Maybe it would get a ranking of Recommended for a library in the SW, but other than being set in a desert environment, with desert animals as the characters, I don’t find anything else particularly unique about it.  It tells the story of Old Armadillo waiting at home for the trick-or-treaters to come, but he gradually gives up and goes to bed because no one is coming, but outside they are all congregating and waiting for the rest of the gang to arrive.  Then they all ring his bell at once and they all have a party together.  The pictures are rather dark, which was probably intentional to set the Halloween mood, but I actually found them more gloomy than spooky.

A cute story about a baby elephant who’s getting teased by his big sister for not knowing how to squirt dirt or water out of his trunk.  By the end of the story big sister gets squirted right between the eyes.  The illustrations are bold and bright.  A strong additional purchase, bordering on the recommended.

This is the second one of these books I’ve gotten for free from SSBRC, and I haven’t liked either one of them.  I don’t think I’ll pick up any more, even if they are free.  They are really cheesy and pedantic.  Even knowing they are intended for a very young audience (probably strictly PreK, but maybe K at a stretch), I still feel like they read down to kids.  There are better books to teach the lessons with more of an actual story, without being  so preachy.

Charming illustration in the tradition of claymation accompany simple rhyming text of noun-verb phrases, mostly set in pairs of adult/young animals (e.g. “Chicken clucks, chick scratches. Duck quacks, duckling hatches.”) It’s cute, it’s sweet, and it’s got educational opportunities teaching rhyme, animals, and grammar.  It’s limited audience almost made me list it as “additional purchase,” but I think I’m going to go ahead and give it “Recommended.”

There’s probably a limited audience to whom this book will appeal.  It tells the story of a young girl moving to Israel with her parents.  She describes the new things she experiences and how she misses her grandmother, keeping in touch by phone, emails, and letters until her first visit.  Though there are certain themes in the book that would carry over to any child making a move to a new culture, it really is very specific to Israel, and would probably appeal mostly to children of Jewish heritage or those who have visited or are planning to visit Israel.

A cute book chronicling the first year of a baby’s life, from the baby’s perspective.  A good tool for teachers trying to teach young writers about the concept of voice, and a fun read for anyone who has a baby brother or sister (or other babies in their lives).

This is the story of a young bunny rabbit who finds a squirrel in the woods that he thinks is sleeping, but when he carries it home his parents inform him that it is dead, and they bury it.  I guess it’s fine, but I think there are better options out there if you need something in your collection explaining death.

Set in the South Africa of its authors, this picture book tells the story of a young (personified) cow who is looking for her soccer ball.  She keeps thinking she’s spotted it only to find she’s mistaken a rock or a fruit or the moon for her ball. In the end, a bird who has been following her throughout her search finally catches up with her and tells her that her ball has been in her backpack all along.  American students will question that the soccer ball and all the items mistaken for it are plain white instead of the black and white patterns they associate with soccer balls.  Many of the objects found in the search will be unfamiliar to American students and may require explanation.

Intended to be used as an instructional tool to teach alphabetic and phonemic skills, this is one book in a series of twenty-six, with each book focusing on a specific letter of the alphabet.  If this were a tool being used in the classrooms of your school, it might be nice to have a set in the library for students to explore on their own, but as a stand-alone story it doesn’t reach much beyond adequate, and I’m not sure the cost of investing in the entire set would really be worth the dough.

The subtitle of the book (“Nefarious Silliness”) is fitting.  This is just a fun, silly collection of poems with a Halloween theme.  The illustrations are fun and the poems have a good rhythm and rhyme that make them fun to read.  Some of the poems have a seem a little odd, but still fun. Kids will enjoy.

A small, attractive book, intended for young readers and language learners.  There are just a few sentences on each two-page spread, in large font, presented in both English and Spanish, accompanied by full-page photos or diagrams.  The information up-to-date, in line with our current understanding of space (Pluto is listed along with Ceres and Eris as dwarf planets, rather than with the other planets).  It is a useful tool for beginning readers as well as for introductory science, though the information provided is very basic.

This delightful collection of seven folktales come from diverse traditions including Indian, Chilean, Inuit, Seneca, Scottish, Russian, and West African.  The illustrations are charming, with enough similarities in artistic style to give the book a unified feel, but also some subtle differences that give each story a slightly different flavor, suggesting the culture from which the story comes.  My one criticism of the book, keeping it from achieving an R* rating is that the cover doesn’t seem to match the rest of the book:  the title, combined with the cover art seems to suggest spooky stories, but the “Mystery and Magic” of the title comes more from magic mice and birds and elves, rather than ghosts and goblins that some readers might expect when they pick up the book.

If I was in a bad mood this might even have gotten a “Not Recommended.”  I like the graphics of the format, and I’m choosing to let that influence my rating heavily.  It’s an attractive book, and the engaging graphics will certainly capture kids’ attention.  The problem is that the characters/plot are not particularly well-developed:  a bunch of monster kids play hide-and-seek and the invisible kid wins.  My worry is that when kids choose what looks like a good book, if they are the disappointed by it, it will feed the books-are-boring prejudice that we are always trying to fight.

Organized in chronological order, this is a brief introduction to 13 famous people in American history, and famous quotations uttered by each along the theme of courage.  Each beautifully illustrated two-page spread is dedicated to a different individual, beginning with their name, one of their famous quotes, and the date it was given; then it gives one paragraph of introduction giving the context for when and where the quotation comes from.  Two more pages in the back give extra blurbs on all the individuals, providing further background.  It’s a good introduction to spur student interest, but there’s not enough meat to make it an R*. One question left unanswered in both information paragraphs is why Rosa Parks’s quote came from 1990.

It’s lame.  It claims to be a book about courage, but the big brave thing that Ben manages to do is to ride his bike to his friend’s house by himself, exactly 6 houses from his own, while Mom is standing there watching.  It just doesn’t qualify as an actual story, because there’s no actual plot. But the binding is sturdy and the illustrations are cute.

The limited target audience makes this an Additional Purchase for school libraries, though it may count more as a Recommended for public libraries.  Intended for very young children, both illustrations and text are simple and spare, but the character and plot are certainly something preschool children will relate to:  every time Mommy suggests helping Mimi in some way, Mimi shouts no and insists on doing it herself (I’m guessing she’s two).

It’s crude and crass and tacky.  It started out as a bedtime story a dad told his that made them laugh, and I can see that — there are certainly some who will get a kick out of this kind of humor, but I certainly wouldn’t spend money on it.  They told us in library school that if we don’t have any books in our library that offend us then we are guilty of unconscious censorship, so I’ll keep this in my library to keep me from censorship, but I’m glad it was free and I wouldn’t recommend it to others.  It tells the story of an overweight woman who has a bad case of gas but hasn’t farted in years, and when she finally passes gas in the produce section of the local market all the produce changes colors, resulting in a new trend.

Set in Elizabethan England, this is the tale of girl who is shuffled between disinterested parents, and left to look after herself much of the time.  To make things extra challenging, Meggy has a disability during an historical time period in which such struggles were viewed as just punishment from God sent down upon someone who had it coming.  But Meggy’s got spunk and she faces things head on, making friends along the way, and coming to the rescue when she discovers her drip of a dad is about to be unwittingly used by some thugs to play the key role in a dastardly deed.  There’s a lot about Meggy that kids today can relate to, but there’s a lot about the setting that students will find so very different from their own world, that many may have trouble understanding.  Best suited for more sophisticated readers who have some background knowledge of this time period or used as a read-aloud or literature-circle shared reading experience with an adult who can explain/interpret as questions arise.

It’s an adequate, though limited biography of President Obama, designed for early readers, presented in both English and Spanish, illustrated with photos from the president’s life.  Along the bottom of each page, a timeline grows throughout the book, with new dates/events added to accompany the text.  But as a teaching tool, the timeline failed to represent the passage of time with distance along the line:  all dates were evenly spaced regardless of whether they represented a 4-year or a 7-year gap, and some important events described in the text were left off of the timeline, leaving me as a reader wondering why.

Each two-page spread consists of one full-page color photo of a real kid, accompanied by 2-3 simple sentences (in both English and Spanish), describing some of the behaviors and challenges that autistic children experience.  It is careful to use words like “some” and “may” so as to avoid generalizations lumping all autistic children together.  A useful tool for teaching students about children they may encounter around them but not understand.

A good tool for supporting early childhood social studies curriculum teaching about community workers, the simple text in this book, supported by simple illustrations, clearly describes many facets of the job of garbage collectors. These are members of the community that young children will be aware of, but likely know little about.  I even learned something.

Friendships between two friends are always easier than when a third friend comes along.  Learning to navigate the politics and power-plays that arise in such situations is one of the essential lessons of childhood.  All students will recognize the simple dilemma in this story of two friends playing, and the tensions that arise when a third joins but tries to push one aside.  The illustrations are cute.  The text is spare and simple and direct. The situation is common.

Bright, bold, graphic illustrations accompany very simple rhyming text walking readers through the noises one might encounter on a typical day in the city, from alarm clock ringing, through trash cans knocking, and on through the day until street lights are blinking and children are dreaming.  Useful for teaching about rhymes, nouns, verbs, and observing sounds.