This is a very long story about a boy who dreams of being a wizard who could save the world.  Then he learns about some of the dangers facing the world from global warming, and starts pondering all the future careers he could have to help solve the problem and be a wizard even without magical powers.  Side bars on every page explain the science Diego is learning about, and suggestions for action are listed in the back.  The story part is kind of cheesy (and like I said, long), and I’m not sure it really contributes that much to the science that is to be found in the side bars.  I think it would’ve been a stronger book if it focused more on the substance and less on the cheese.

I like the illustrations, but I’m puzzled by the story.  The cover claims it is “A traditional tale for Easter,” but I there’s nothing about whose tradition it is.  I’m pretty knowledgable about Easter tradition, and I’ve never heard of this one: it basically tells the story of the man Simon, who helped Jesus carry his cross.  According to this story, Simon was a farmer on his way into town to sell eggs and other produce from his farm; after helping Jesus, he made his way back to where he’d left his goods to find the day gone and most of his good destroyed; he returned home with the dozen eggs that were the only items to survive the day; on Sunday morning he found his basket of eggs all cracked and empty and a dozen doves flying around his olive grove.  An author’s note explaining the origins of the tradition would be helpful.

The bird is smarter than the people in this book.  The pet store owner keeps selling his parrot to people who want a talking bird, but can’t recognize that the bird is speaking Spanish, so they keep misunderstanding him and putting him in awkward situations that lead them to keep returning him to the pet store.  In the end he is finally adopted by a bilingual boy who keeps him.  It’s another one that fall into the category of, “fine, I suppose,” but hard to find anything fabulous about it to say.

A boy and his dad are spending the day at the beach, and the boy is listing all the things his dad is not scared of (crabs, jelly fish, sharks…), but at the end he says there’s only one thing he is afraid of, but since the boy isn’t, that makes them heroes together.  It is the left to the illustrations to imply that the one thing Dad is scared of are seagulls stealing his cap.  From he beginning of the book, the seagulls are seen throughout, offering a bit of foreshadowing.  It’s fine, but not spectacular.  The illustrations are more substantial than the text.

This book just really isn’t necessary.  It’s trying to be a combination book, partly telling the story about some boys who are getting ready to surprise their mother for her birthday, and partly being an information book about birthday traditions (purple fact blurbs on each page).  The problem is that the facts and the story keep interrupting each other, and the story isn’t very interesting, and there are better birthday fact books available, so I wouldn’t bother with this one.

A nice rhyming little jingle urging vegetable consumption.  It lists several kinds, reminds us of the valuable vitamins they contain, and declares that tomatoes are indeed veggies not fruits.  It defines a vegetable as a plant grown as food, but the designates those grown on trees as fruit. But are all fruits grown on trees? Not berries. But I don’t think strawberries count as a vegetable. Hm…  I was hoping for a little more discussion as to the characteristics defining the different food groups. It’s cute for what it is, but it’s not a necessary purchase.

I listed it as a K-5 book, but I could see it having its uses among older students as well.  It is a Jewish folktale about a ruler who dresses as a servant to go see if the people of his land are happy.  After enjoying the hospitality of poor man who is very happy and generous despite his poverty, the ruler decides to test the faith of this man:  he keeps making declarations that put an end to the man’s ability to earn his evening meal, but the man keeps finding a new line of work.  When he makes him a soldier, who will not receive his pay until the end of the month, the man sells his silver sword for money to tide him over, and carves a wooden one to carry in his scabbard.  When the man is asked to execute a thief he prays aloud in he square that if the thief deserves his fate that his sword be sharp, but if the thief deserves mercy that his sword turn to wood, and so the thief is spared, the ruler is impressed with the man’s steadfastness and wisdom, and rewards him with a position as a royal advisor. In the end, everything worked out as it should.

Okay, I said it’s for grades K-2, but really it’s also for anyone who loves a dog. It’s a poem with a young girl declaring all the ways and reasons she loves her dog.  The water-color illustrations are just sweet.  It makes you go, “ahh…” And I’m a cat person.

It appears to be a children’s picture book, telling the tale of Noah’s brother Neil, who saved all the vegetables from the Great Flood while his brother saved the animals.  The thing is, I’m not sure if children really are its target audience, or if it’s really intended for adults.  In sketching the characters of the two brothers, Noah is described as an ambitious business man (the illustration of the animals getting loaded onto the ark two-by-two shows them drawn with butchers’ markings showing the different cuts of beef).  In contrast, Neil, the hero of the tale is described as a poor hippy who “wore his hair long and chatted dreamily to pot plants.”  Much as I hate to be put into the role of book censor, I’m not sure I can put this in my elementary school library, where we’re trying to convince children that drugs are a bad idea.  Can it go in a high school library? Is the public library the better place for it? I’m not assigning an grade level to it, because I’m not sure who to put.

It’s got a lot of good information, but I’m not sure I like the cartoon illustrations and the literary device of setting the information within a context of imagining you are actually traveling to Uranus.  Rather than enhancing the information, they seem to baby it down — I’m afraid older elementary students will turn up their noses at it.

When a young vampire first gets his grown-up fangs he’s anxious to bite something, and runs all around the neighborhood driving everyone batty until he meets the new kids who’ve moved into the neighborhood.  When the boy he’s trying to make friends with is complaining about his little sister’s habit of biting, Moony goes along with declaring biting to be baby stuff, as he’s more interested in making a friend than in biting.  It’s full of vampiric plays-on-words.  Both story and illustrations are a bit on the bland side.

Essentially a wordless story, using a graphic novel, it tells the tale of a magician’s rabbit, and the mischief he gets into after the magician has gone home for the day, tormenting the dog, spilling milk, and generally creating havoc as he tries to get the carrots out of the magician’s kitchen.  Like other wordless books, it can serve as a useful writing or story telling prompt.

There will be plenty who will raise objections to the assuredness with with which the author speaks of a theory many still consider controversial.  The  first page of the foreward declares, “that theory has given us the correct explanation of our origins.”  My own objection that keeps it from getting a full-fledge recommendation has to do with the density of material: it is attempting to be a book for young people, but even I found it challenging at time.  It will be a good tool for students who already have a strong interest in the topic and the perseverance to wade through it.

It really does a pretty good job of taking some pretty complex concepts and making them comprehensible to kids.  It doesn’t brush over things or speak in too-broad generalities, but it uses kid language and examples to illustrate big ideas about how our universe works.  It also includes historical background on how our human understanding of gravity has changed over time.  A good selection of photos gives it visual appeal.

In keeping with the general style of the rest of this series, the book sets the stage to put the reader into the past, breaks information into small bits scattered around the pages that are illustrated in an engaging cartoon-like manner.  This volume does a good job of comprehensively explaining the short-lived history of the Pony Express, sharing who got it started and why, how it worked, and why it came to an end.  I’m just not sure how well it lives up to its title, as I can imagine many students reading it and thinking it sounds like a grand adventure they would’ve loved to be part of.

To be quite frank, I found this book a bit insulting to libraries, even though I know that was not the intent.  On the surface it’s a nice little story about a man who knows his town needs a library, and he wonders what he could do to help, and all it seems to take is for him to dig the hole, recruit a carpenter friend to build the walls, a plumber friend to add the pipes, an electrician friend to string the light, and to ask the townspeople to clean out their homes for the extra books they don’t need.  A quality library needs so much more: no mention of qualified staff, furnishings, computers, quality materials…talk about over-simplification.  In the end, I fear it undermines the true value of a quality library.

A shy frog is having a terrible time as her class prepares for their stage production.  Every time she tries to rehearse she is overcome by stage fright, and in the end she finds a way to contribute her own gifts toward the production by creating the scenery.  It’s got cute pictures, but I have mixed feelings about the message it sends: does it unintentionally encourage students to avoid things that take them outside their comfort zone?

The story of a shy little girl going to visit her neighbor who has recently moved into a retirement home.  On her first visit Lily hides behind her mother and refuses to say hello, but over the course of several visits she begins to make friends among the residents of the home, and by the end she’s celebrating her birthday with them. The illustrations are bright and cheerful and convey the distinctly Jewish features of the characters.  The book is not about being Jewish — its plot line is universal — it just happens to be set among a Jewish community, a group that has sometimes been left out of the wider trend toward multi-culturalism in children’s literature.

I’m not a fan of graphic novels. I picked this one up because I know I have a lot of students who are fans, but then I put off reading it because I didn’t want to have to.  Then it turned out I liked it.  A work of historical fiction set during the Napoleonic wars, it tells the story of a young boy on his first voyage with a British war ship.  The characters and the plot are well developed, and sidebars on each page provide definitions and context for historical references, and I’ve decided that graphic novels provide a particularly good format for introducing students to unfamiliar historical periods because the illustrations give them a visual of what it was like.

It’s not that there’s anything bad about the book.  It’s kind of clever in it’s own way: it’s basically a thinly disguised get-ready-for-the-changes-that-come-when-there’s-a-new-baby-in-the-house book.  The difference here is that the unasked for surprise that mom and dad brought home is a bear.  Some problems are the same (broken toys, busy parents); some changes are different (a bear can lift him up to see in the mirror and hold a broken tree branch).  The thing is there are so many of these books out there, and a library really only needs so many, and I think there are better ones.

This is a splendidly gorgeous re-telling of the traditional tale.  The paper is heavy, quality paper.  The illustrations are stunning.  The characters have personality.  It’s all together delightful.

So I only made it an additional purchase because it is yet another new-baby-arriving-in-the-family book, and I guess you really only need so many of those, but if you’re not overloaded already, and are looking for another title along these lines, this is a good one.  I almost gave it a full-fledged recommendation.  Most of the book is dedicated to a little brother telling about all the things his big brother can do.  Along the way he refers to a secret they share, and in the end it turns out that the little brother becomes a big brother.

The main character is already familiar to students.  The illustrations are vibrant and inviting.  The text is simple and straightforward.  The story manages to endorse reading and prepare young readers for a new baby in the family at the same time.  It’s a good combo.

Because just a few sentences of text on each page are accompanied by large color photos supporting the text, this book is a good tool for emergent readers.  Because all text is presented in both English and Spanish, it is good for language learners.  Often I find it a handicap when a non-fiction book is intended for emergent readers, because I find them light on information, but because this is a topic about which students often have little understanding, this volume is sufficient to give them a brief overview of how igloos are constructed, by whom, and why they are designed as they are. I learned several things myself.

A very basic volume for young readers that gives a general overview of how bodies work, presented in both English and Spanish.  Color full-page photos are accompanied by just a few sentences of text.  Useful for beginning readers and language learners, but not super informative.  For some kinds of information, diagrams of the inside of the body would have been more helpful in supporting the text than the photos provided.