The topic will be a popular one.  The illustrations are inviting.  The ABC format makes it easily accessible, and it’s packed with information.  The rhyming seems a bit contrived at times, and some of the key alphabet words seem a bit of a stretch in terms of relevance to Roman history, but I think its strengths outweigh its weaknesses.  A map in the front illustrates the extent of the Roman Empire at its peak.

A gentle, soft, touching tale about letting go of a loved one.  Old Pig and Granddaughter have lived together for a long time, comfortable in the routines in which they help each other, but one day the routine is thrown off when Old Pig finds herself too tired to get up as usual for breakfast.  When she does finally feel well enough to get up, she’s still tired, but feels the need to make some preparations, including taking a long walk with Granddaughter celebrating the simple delights of life.  Granddaughter cares for Old Pig right up until”for the very last time Old Pig and Granddaughter held each other tight until morning.”  The soft illustrations beautifully capture and help to set the gentle mood of the story.  A wonderfully comforting book to share with someone facing their own loss.

I think whether this book would qualify as recommended or additional purpose will depend on the purpose you are seeking to fill.  It’s got a lot of information presented in a very readable fashion, rather like a travel diary.  The information isn’t organized terribly well for research purposes, so if it’s strictly an information book you’re looking for, it would probably be an additional purchase.  But if you’d like to use the sports connection to spark some reader’s interest in geography and travel, then I could recommend this (and probably the rest of the series).  The one thing I wished for that could have made this an R* would be to have more photos to help support the text.  One feature I really did like (besides the voice that made it so inviting) was that it included excerpts from the glossary in little blurbs along the way, right on the pages where the words would be needed.  Let’s face it, kids tend to be pretty lazy about actually using the glossaries in the back, but putting the “Words 2 Know” blurbs right on the applicable page would be helpful.

A book designed to teach children about business basics, this is the story of a young girl who wants a doll she sees on sale and must find a way to earn the money to pay for it.  After determining what marketable skills she has, she must find a way to cover start-up costs, so she goes to her friends and offers to let them in on the ground-floor:  they each invest a dollar in the hopes of sharing in the profits.  At the end of the story all the math works out nice-and-tidy, even allowing for sales tax.  In the back of the book, a two-page author’s note connects the dots for kids, explaining plainly the parallels between the story and the way the stock market works.

This nearly wordless book, illustrated all in black, white, and red, uses graphic-novel panels to tell the story of the day Bruno the Burglar tunneled his way out of the Big House and led the guards a merry chase through town all in his quest to take advantage of free sundaes being offered on Valentine’s Day.  It’s sometimes a bit difficult to discern the actual plot line, and when I did, I didn’t care much about it.

It’s a fine biography of a man I knew little of, but there’s nothing about it that really makes me want to recommend it particularly.  I don’t think students will be familiar enough with the scientist in question to be likely to pick it up on their own, and there doesn’t seem to be much to capture their attention if they did.  It’s not bad, but there’s probably better options available.  It does have a very sturdy binding.

Regardless of one’s political viewpoints, there’s no denying that Barack Obama did indeed make history when he became America’s first black president.  The wide variety of individuals covered in this “History Maker Bios” series come from all aspects of society.  The information is clearly written in a very readable voice, and well-illustrated with photos.  Given the opportunity, I would like to have more biographies from this series.

A beautiful story about the power of story.  The story is prefaced with a folktale told to the main character by is mother, and the body of the story tells of a young boy’s imagination being captures by this familiar folktale.  On an outing with his father, when young Jiro is left to explore a neighbor’s garden, he wanders into a tea house where he falls asleep and dreams he’s met the Crane woman from the folktale.  The way the story is told, the line between reality and dream is a blurry one.  The illustrations to an amazing job of capturing both the setting and the mood of the story.

Designed a bit like a guessing game, this fun look at the history of medicine is organized by ailment.  For each malady, it presents several remedies used throughout history, asking the reader to guess which if any had any actual benefit to the patients.  In the subsequent pages it addresses each remedy in turn, describing in more detail how and when and where it was applied, and sometimes why, answering the question as to its efficacy.  It’s a fun way to look at how far we’ve come, and to make the prospect of a trip to a modern doctor much more palatable, even if we are likely to face getting a shot. I think kids will be intrigued.

A simple science reader for young students, this bilingual text explains the traits that define the distinction between living and non-living things.  Examples familiar to young students are given, and the text is accompanied by color photos to help illustrate key points.  It seems to be a smaller version of the Pebble Plus series: similar format, but smaller size.  I find something is lost in the smaller books — if the same titles were available in both, I would recommend the larger format over the smaller.

Bright, comical illustrations and simple, direct text join to tell the story of how big black Crow makes friends with smaller, brighter birds hanging out on the electrical wire.  At first the little birds are scared of Crow and will have nothing to do with him.  Determined to make friends, Crow tries to paint himself to look like the others, only to frighten them more.  In the end, the little birds decide they like having Crow around, crediting him with scaring off the big colorful birds he was pretending to be.  In the end they like him for himself, and Crow must decide whether or not to tell his new friends how their friendship really came about.  It’s a charming book.

This is a story of adjusting to change.  Set in the days of horse-drawn buggies and homesteaders moving west, it tells of Elsie, a happy young girl growing up in Boston.  After her mother’s death, her father decides to seek change by moving Elsie and himself to a sod-roofed home on the prairies of Nebraska.  Elsie has a hard time adjusting to the change, and her only comfort comes from singing to and with her pet canary.  She keeps herself confined to the cabin, afraid to explore her strange new surroundings, until one day when her canary escapes — in rushing after the lost bird, Elsie comes to discover many delights in her new home, making it feel like her home at last.  It’s a sweet, gentle story.

I know Dean Koontz is a famous novelist, and apparently (according to the flyleaf) there have been several other Trixie books before this one, but I’m afraid I wasn’t as impressed as I wanted to be.  The theme is one that kids can relate to: how long a week seems when your best friend is gone.  The pictures are cute.  The ungrammatical parts are probably done on purpose for some reason, but they didn’t really seem to add to my experience of the characters or the story, and I tend to think if you’re putting improper grammar in front of kids there ought to be a good reason for it.  There probably was, but I couldn’t discern it.  It’s trying to read like a poem, but I didn’t find the flow to read all that smoothly.  Over all, it was fine, but not I wasn’t wowed by it.

The purpose of this book is to be a counting-by-fives book, and as such it does a nice job.  It’s got cute pictures of ladybugs, each with five spots on it’s shell, and a new ladybug joins each page, as a domino-style counter in the corner helps the reader count by fives.  The target numeral is hidden in the picture on each page (kids love hunting for hidden elements in the pictures).  It uses rhythm in the repetition of the counting on each page.  In addition, it has another features which could be used as teaching tools, such as alliteration and a repeating adjective-noun-verb-object sentence pattern which could be used in language lessons.  Unfortunately, the bilingual aspect of the book seems to have been a bit of an after-thought and is somewhat clunky at times:  the alliteration is lost and the sentence structure/rhythm don’t work as well.

Another good choice in the Pebble Plus series.  Like the other books in this series, this title features full-page color photos to support the text, a high-interest non-fiction topic for students, text which is accessible to early readers (large font, with just a few simple sentences per page), and solid information.  This particular title begins by describing some typical features of hip-hop dance and goes on to instruct students in some simple moves.  I particularly like that the photos that accompany the text feature other children.

I pretty much like all the books I’ve seen in this series.  I like that it uses large full-page color photos to support the text and capture student interest.  I like that they choose high-interest non-fiction topics to spark students’ curiosity.  I like that they provide sound information in non-threatening format (large font; only a couple of sentences per page) that is accessible to early readers.  I like that “bilingual” applies to all parts of the book, including extra text features (glossary, index, etc.) and not only the body of the text.  And I like the sturdy bindings.  In this particular title, I do wish they had made the connection between hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones in body of the text and not only in the glossary, as many students tend to skip reading the glossary, but might be interested in that bit.  The only thing that keeps these from an R* rating is that because they target emergent readers, it means you’re not getting a huge amount of meat for your buck.  Still, it’s definitely Recommended.

I generally avoid lift-the-flap books in the library, just like I avoid pop-up books, because they’re not likely to have a long life.  So that is already one mark against getting a recommendation, and in addition, this has a very limited audience: strictly preK-K.  Each page has a Who __________? question (e.g. “Who wears a carrot for a nose?” with the answer revealed when the reader unfolds either the top or bottom half of the page.  The illustrations are cute, and it’s kind of fun to see how some of them shift with the unfolding of the flap, so that saves the book from an NR rating, but the best I can do is to call it an “Additional Purchase.”

This charming and delightful story is told from the perspective of the family dog when his people decide to bring home a cat (without asking him first).  All his efforts to make friends seem to awry, despite his best intentions (because of course neither the cat nor the people understand dogspeak), and Stanley keeps ending up in trouble.  Comical illustrations compliment the story nicely.

A charming biography told from an unusual perspective, it highlights many of the struggles Abraham Lincoln faced, and always returns to how he was able to harness the power of humor and words to help.  Perhaps the subtitle would be more fitting if it claimed “served” in place of “saved,” but that’s my only real criticism:  This book takes one of our most famous presidents and makes him seem more human, less iconic, someone the readers would like to have known.  I definitely think it has a place in every elementary school library, and maybe middle school as well.

This is a simple book paying homage to mothers with classic De Paola illustrations.  Starting from the perspective of an infant, and moving on through toddler to child, each page includes one sentence with accompanying illustration, stating one way the author’s mom demonstrates her brilliance — from knowing when to change his diaper to knowing how to make popsicles to knowing how to dress like a movie star when she’s going out. It’s charming and full of experiences many children will relate to, a good read around Mother’s Day.

It’s got an attractive and sturdy-looking binding and attractive illustrations:  Each two-page spread consists of a large color illustration of a single dinosaur on the right, accompanied by 2-3 simple sentences in large font telling a couple facts about that dinosaur and its “big” features.  An inset on each page tells the size of that dinosaur.  “Chapters” are Big, Bigger, and Biggest.  Though an attractive volume for beginning readers who are dinosaur enthusiasts, it’s limited in the amount of information in provides.

Though not likely to be a high-interest book selected for recreational reading, this may fit a curriculum niche.  It describes how levers work and compares different types, always connecting them to real-life tools with which kids will be familiar, such as a shovel, scissors, teeter-totter, nut-cracker, and baseball bat.  The text is simply stated, to make concepts understandable to beginning readers, and well-supported by photos and labeled diagrams.  Besides being useful in science instruction, it also includes typical non-fiction text features such as glossary (with words bolded in the body of the text), index, and table of contents.  Sturdy binding.

This book begins by describing how scientists classify animals according to how they are alike and different, and goes on to list some of the defining characteristics that make fish fish.  It then takes a closer look at each characteristic with clear, labeled illustrations.  There were some unfamiliar fish mentioned in the text (clingfish, hagfish) that were not included in the illustrations, and though the book says it has a reinforced library binding, the finish on the cover doesn’t feel like it will stand up to much wear.  Includes scientific classification chart.

This book discusses the history of money, from the days of bartering, and different things that have been used as mediums of exchange through time and in different places.  It includes information about the earliest metal coins and paper money and describes the details of US coins and Euros.  Be wary that the information about Euros could become outdated as countries who use the Euro continue to change.  The first and last chapters sandwich the information of the middle chapters amidst a story of a boy bringing his coin collection in for show-and-tell, which seems to fuzz the lines between fiction and non-fiction.

Describes the history of the camera from the discovery that silver salts darken when exposed to light, up to modern digital cameras, explaining the basics of how each version works.  The significance of cameras to society and jobs is discussed. Labeled diagrams help illustrate the information.  Index, glossary, recommended web links and timeline are included, with the words included in the glossary highlighted within the body of the text.  I found some of the choices as to which words to include in the glossary a bit odd (“demonstrated”), and I worry about the currency of the information (it says that most people use color film these days, but I believe that digital cameras have nearly eliminated film altogether).