With vivid colorful illustrations and rhythmic rhyming text, McGinty and Harris explore the majesty of the sea. The rich descriptive language helps form a picture of the ocean for young learners.

The sea knows stars in shallow pools
Below, it knows alluring jewels
The sea knows worlds of red and gold
The sea knows bright / The sea knows bold.

Use to start a study of the sea or to practice descriptive language. The appendix contains an explanation of each phrase and offers a starting point for further investigation.

Whether good or bad, “things” go away. A bird, sleep, lice, a bad thought The big and small aspects of our everyday life do not stay the same.  Yet one thing will always remain. The hug that concludes the book shows the “thing” that will never pass, move on, or change is love. This is a comforting book that will bring a smile to your heart.

Beatrice Alemagna cleverly uses a see-through page with a black drawing to illustrate change as the image moves, fades, or is transformed with the flip of the page. A close look at the illustrations can guide a closer look at what changes in our lives.

As Christian Robinson portrays a circular path of interconnection, he reminds us that we all matter. Starting and ending with little stuff too small to see, Robinson’s text and illustrations remind us that our place in the world, how we are perceived by others, or our successes or failures cannot change the fact that at the most basic level, each part of our world matters. Even compared the magnitude of space and the breadth of time we matter. The powerful words interspersed with the refrain “you matter’ circles back to the small stuff.

A must have for all libraries and an excellent tool to support Social Emotional Learning lessons.

Lubaya is a quiet child who appears to sit on the sideline whether it’s at school, with friends or home with family.  Yet, while not engaged as you would expect from a child, she takes the world around her and merges it with her imagination.  This imagination finds an outlet on the back of old protest posters. Upsetting news on the TV has her family reclaiming the protest posters for another march.  In this way, Lubaya’s truth and dreams in artistic form become part of the message of the protest. The beauty of this message is Lubaya’s quiet roar.

In a time when protests are regularly on the news, Lubaya’s Quiet Roar reminds us that the loudest voices don’t necessarily have the most to say. We all have the potential to listen, look, dream and illustrate a different, better world.

Awful, infuriating, disgusting. Maybe, because I grew up in UT with the constant reminder of Warren Jeffs and his brainwashing of “his people” that I just did not enjoy this book. It is just a reminder of the evil and corruptness that comes from people who pray on the sick, weak, lost. 

Carlitos lives with his mother and his abuela in a town across the harbor from Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. His cozy, happy, and comfortable life is colored by the lack of a father. His family looks different than those he sees around him. This lack has him crossing the bay to look for his father in Old San Juan – by himself.

The story leads Carlitos to interact with many interesting people in many interesting and beautiful places throughout the city. Carlitos spirits eventually plummets when he loses his only picture of his father. With the help of a park ranger, he realizes sad things are like dark clouds and that the sun always returns. With a lighter heart, he returns home.

Across the Bay is a sweet story with lovely illustrations. While I enjoyed the story and appreciate the portrayal of Puerto Rico, I found the fact that a young child leaves home to explore a large city alone rather disconcerting.

Aaron and Tillie stand on the George Washington Bridge expecting to end their lives.  Aaron and Tillie don’t know each other but they’ve come to the same conclusion that suicide is the only viable option for each.  What happens in Aaron jumps and Tillie doesn’t.  Or vice versa?  Or if they both jump?  Or if neither do? Bill Konigsberg’s genius is in his character development, and the story-telling technique of four possible plotlines allows for finite details of Aaron and Tillie’s personalities to emerge. They are genuine, they are real, they have issues, they have choices. Readers are led to consider how “life” is impacted by the choices we make. Bill Konigsberg develops an authentic description of what depression might feel like and he doesn’t glamourize suicide. It is questionable whether or not readers will find the fourth story to be repetitive but overall this unique take on a serious topic will keep readers intrigued.

Many in the United States take the right to vote for granted. The struggle for equality in voting rights, however, has been a struggle for all the many year of our nation’s history. Equality’s Call is a wonderful introduction the story of voting rights in America.

The book begins with the establishment of our system of government and the inclusion of consent and representation in our foundational national documents. But this same inclusion excluded most of the new nation’s population due to gender, race, or wealth. The story steps through history, explaining some of the milestones in expanding voting rights.

The refrain, equality’s call is repeated with each milestone, “A right isn’t a right / Till it’s granted to all.” The book closes with a reminder that the journey isn’t over and voter suppression is another form of disenfranchisement. Each vote we make is possible because of the struggles of others in the past and it is our responsibility to ensure the right to vote to all.

In this dystopian novel, teenaged Natalina “Nat” Peña lives in a future San Francisco, where she works as a hotel maid, practices martial arts, and cares for her eleven-year-old brother, Calvino. “Cal” should be starting to ‘wane’, where kids in their teens begin to lose their ability to feel emotions. Nat has already waned. Their mother is dead, having died from taking bad “emotion” drugs while trying to regain her own lost emotions. And their dad is estranged and missing. When a corporation kidnaps Cal to do medical research on him to determine why he isn’t waning, Nat feels a series of emotions and this shocks her. Why is she feeling? An interesting premise for a dystopian novel.

What she does next takes up the bulk of the book. And this is where the premise failed for me. There was too much violence, too many unexplained secret weapons, too many unrealistic situations. I just could not buy it. Some die-hard fans of dystopia who are looking for a new book may enjoy it, but The Waning Age is not for me.