Eh.  It’s fine.  It’s a cutesy little story about a personified bear, whose mother has warned him to stay away from people, who starts worrying when he hears about the tooth fairy because he doesn’t know whether the tooth fairy is a bear or a person.  He consults many other personified animal friends, getting into discussions about the Easter Bunny, Santa, and Old Mother Hubbard along the way.  For this bear, Santa and the tooth fairy both turn out to be bears.  Will young human children find their own beliefs about these characters challenged?

Beautifully illustrated non-fiction, describing the startlingly long migration of the godwits from Alaska to New Zealand.  It chronicles a single godwit, from hatching in June, to fattening itself up and learning to fly, through taking off with her flock in mid-October, struggles with weather avoiding birds of prey, to her arrival in New Zealand eight days and 7,270 non-stop miles later.  The story really is a compelling one to add to a science unit on migration and/or birds, and the illustrations really are stunning.  My one criticism of the book is the way it continually referred the bird it was tracking as “the young female.”  I found it repetitive and a little annoying (the feminist in me kept asking what difference it made that the bird was female — do males not make this journey?).

The action and violence and battle scenes in this series tend to mark it for a male audience, but the characters and plots are well enough developed that I and some other female friends have enjoyed it also.  Given the violence, these books may be most fitting for middle school and high school audiences, but a good friend who is also an elementary librarian says she’s got a lot of fifth grade boys who love the series,   so I’ve added the complete collection to my shelves as well, but I only market it to fifth graders.  This, the eighth book in the series, takes place when Will has ceased to be an apprentice, and is a Ranger in his own right, but he’s teamed up with his former mentor and warrior friend to form an emergency squad sent to squash the growth of a cult who is taking over a neighboring country, stealing people blind and gradually over-taking the established authorities.