This is the Spanish translation of Dress-Up Day. It’s a sweet story of a young girl who is all excited, anticipating a school costume party, but after helping her mom make a fabulous bunny costume, she is disappointed to wake up ill on the day of the party and has to miss the party. When she’s feeling better the next day, mom suggests she where her rabbit costume that day instead, and her joy is restored. Until she gets to school and the other kids stare and laugh, and she begins to doubt. Joy is restored once again when another classmate who was ill the day before also turns up in his costume, and by the end of the day he has become her best friend. The next day all the kids show up in costumes, convincing our protagonist that she’d had a great idea all along. The illustrations are charming, and the dilemma, as well as its solution are very relatable for young children: the difficulty of being all alone, and the power of a single friend to turn things around.

This is the Spanish language translation of Growing an Artist. I like this book for a lot of reasons. It’s a very personal book for the author/illustrator, sharing how his own experiences working alongside his dad in the family landscaping business as a child nurtured his own interest in art, while showing him how he could use is art to contribute to his community. It shows readers that their own stories are worthwhile, even if they seem ordinary. It shares experiences that may be familiar to a lot of readers, validating those experiences. It’s a feel-good book, celebrating and honoring ordinary life and work and relationships.

I like this book for a lot of reasons. It’s a very personal book for the author/illustrator, sharing how his own experiences working alongside his dad in the family landscaping business as a child nurtured his own interest in art, while showing him how he could use is art to contribute to his community. It shows readers that their own stories are worthwhile, even if they seem ordinary. It shares experiences that may be familiar to a lot of readers, validating those experiences. It’s a feel-good book, celebrating and honoring ordinary life and work and relationships.

I’ve heard of Rube Goldberg Machines, and I know the super-over-complicated type of thing to which the term refers. I’ve seen some in action at science museums and such. I only realized from reading the flap of this book that Rube Goldberg never actually built any of his creative, inventive machines — he was a cartoonist; he drew things that his training as an engineer told him should work in theory, but he never put those theories to the test. Yet his work inspired many others to design and build contraptions in the spirit of his drawings. This book is a series of cartoons starring a young Rube designing incredibly complicated ways to fake being sick and then do all sorts of things a kid might want to do one a day off from school, always in the most complicated, absurd, silly way possible. The steps of each contraption are labeled with alphabet letters, and the text describes in sequence how each is theoretically designed to work. It’s fun. It’s silly. It may trigger readers’ inner inventors and engineers. A website in the back directs those kids who are intrigued to where they can learn more about such designs.

We talk about books serving sometimes as windows and sometimes as mirrors. Depending on where a reader this lives, this book could do either. I’ve never lived in a place where there are tornadoes, or other wind storms so strong they destroy homes while families hide in storm cellars. For me, this book is a window, showing me in simple straightforward terms, from a child’s perspective, what that might be like. For students who may have experienced such things, it may serve as a mirror, validating their own experiences, letting them know they’re not alone. The book offers a sense of hope in the face of devestation: when the family rise from the cellar to find their home destroyed, they are still able to find enough in the rubble to fix themselves a meal and wash dishes and blow bubbles. Despite the somber story, it ends with laughter: “Those laughs didn’t change anything. They made no difference. Those laughs changed everything. They made all the difference in the world.” It’s a powerful book.

It manages to tick the boxes for early readers with rhythm and rhyme and short sentences and pictures to support the text, while still having a story to it, and one that young children can relate to. The main character is told to get ready for bed by a mom who pleads with him to avoid “dino-drama,” but the illustrations show the reader that after bath time, when he puts on his dinosaur bathrobe, his imagination takes over and he sees himself as a dinosaur who has a terrible time finding suitable pajamas. He joyfully decides he should be wild and free and naked until mom yells, “No more play time! That is it!” and he decides (now back to being a boy in a dino-robe instead of an actual dinosaur) that he better find some clothes that fit. Highly relatable for both parents and children.

It begins with a girl’s description of her Grana as one who once told the best stories, but who is now too weak to tell stories, and Grana’s question that if we can touch the moon, what is impossible. At bedtime the girl ponders Grana’s question as she gazes at the moon and feels compelled to pursue the impossible. What follows is a fanciful adventure in which she launches herself from her bed into the night sky and pursues several adventures with the characters of the constellations on her way to try to touch the moon. She misses her mark, and finds herself falling sleepily back to earth, now with stories of her own to tell, along with the confidence to continue to pursue the impossible. The illustrations are beautiful and suit the imaginative nature of the tale.

My one gripe with this book is that I find the character of the substitute librarian completely unbelievable, because I can’t imagine any librarian taking his attitude. Still, I know many other adults who do hold such ideas, and who often pass such attitudes to young readers, though perhaps more subtly than does the character in the book. The story tells of a boy visiting a book mobile only to be confronted by a librarian who tells him all the books he wants to read aren’t for him, trying to channel him into his own narrow idea of what is appropriate reading for him. The boy accepts what is offered him, but then subverts the efforts of the narrow-minded librarian by reading under a nearby tree where other patrons are reading (a girl, a robot, a cat, etc), and trading books with the girl who’s reading the book he wanted to read in the first place. When a dinosaur shows up and scares the librarian into giving him the book he wants, regardless of his own opinions, the young boy learns to find his own voice and insist on getting what he wants. The story takes things to the extreme to make the point about those more subtle attitudes.