As a personal souvenir of her trip, maybe to share with family & friends, this is a beautiful book, but as a published work for the general public, I don’t think it’s got enough focus (or is it an issue of enough breadth?) to appeal to random readers.  This author has written other books that got lots of impressive awards, but I just thought this rambled.

Okay, so maybe I’m not a fair judge, as I haven’t read the first four books in the series, and maybe I would like it better if I had, but the reality of series is that students don’t always come to them in order, and each volume really needs to be able to stand alone in my opinion.  This one didn’t.  There’s no explanation of characters or plot — it just picks up in the middle of some adventure with some kid trying to rescue his friends, but there’s no character development to get me to care.  Maybe if all of that had been addressed in the earlier volumes I would already care, but I didn’t.  Most definitely not recommended unless you get the whole set, and I still don’t know that I’d recommend it.

There are better versions out there.  This is a simple volume of 13 traditional nursery rhymes, one rhyme on each two page spread, accompanies by full-page painted illustrations.  The illustrations were a bit bland and washed out.  But it’s got a really sturdy binding!

This is a beautiful, informative, and valuable book.  Our world is so often torn apart when we look at the things that divide us.  This is a text on comparative religions that uses the approach of looking at similarities.  It starts with a brief description of what faith is, and what the five most common world religions are.  It then looks at various elements that are common to many or all of these, such as sacred texts, symbols, prayers, etc.  It is illustrated with photographs (often of children), and next to each photograph is a simple caption stating which religion it is depicting.  I think every school library needs to have this book.

This book is one that just makes you go, “ahhh…”  For every kid who has relatives who live far away, this touching book about a grandmother missing her grandson will touch home.  The text is downright poetical. The illustrations are beautiful.  After comparing all the ways life is different where she lives from where he lives, it ends with the acknowledgment that they share the same moon.

Over all, I am generally a fan of Scholastic’s True Book series, but this one didn’t seem to do as good a job as the others of really getting concrete and clear in its explanations of complex scientific concepts.  Perhaps it was a function of how much material they were trying to cover within the same number of pages, but the information seemed to skim a bit more across the surface level.  It’s not bad, but I think it would have been stronger if it had gone more in depth, maybe having a different volume for each type of simple machine.

Like other books in this series, this one takes some pretty abstract scientific concepts (such as the difference between different types of energy), and explains them in simple terms, using concrete examples that are familiar to students.  It’s a useful and worthwhile tool to support the science curriculum, though it’s unlikely to be chosen for recreational reading.

This book does a good job (as I have found to generally be the case with this series) of taking some pretty complex scientific concepts, such as friction, inertia, and centrifical force, and explain them in clear and understandable language.  It sets up several experiments to illustrate its points that students could fairly easily replicate on their own.  In addition to the experiments for students, it also includes information about famous scientists and the early discoveries regarding motion.  I do however have one and a half gripes: gripe number one is that when it is describing the effects of centrifugal force, it never actually names it as such, missing a perfect opportunity to build scientific vocabulary; my half gripe is that it sets up experiments for students to conduct, and then proceeds to describe what the results would be, thereby taking away the need for students to actually try it themselves (but it’s only half a gripe, because I grudgingly acknowledge that this way students who wouldn’t bother to do the experiments may actually learn from them anyway).

This is actually a collection of four of Grimms’ tales: Tom Thumb, The Fisherman and His Wife, Hans in Luck, and The Seven Swabians.  I would have liked it better if Eric Carle had dedicated an individual book to each of the first three (the last one was a little odd — could’ve just not bothered).  His distinctive and fabulous artwork is what makes Eric Carle’s work so amazing, but this volume had too high a ratio of white space and words to somewhat limited artwork.

I loved this book.  I put off reading it for a long time because I thought it was going to be a chore, but it was actually a lot of fun, and I learned a lot, too.  A collective biography of U.S. presidents from George Washington to Barak Obama, this book focuses more on who the presidents were as people, rather than focusing on policies and politics.  With some of the less interesting presidents earning only 1/3 of a page, and others granted four whole pages, each biography includes a caricature, birth and death dates and locations (where applicable), and an interesting look at who that president was, including bits about their marriages and family lives, and what kinds of foods they liked to eat, as well as some pertinent historical stuff.  I gotta tell you — over the years we’ve had some pretty useless presidents.  I just wish they included at the beginning of each (or else a timeline somewhere) the dates for which each was president.