The binding is great.  The full-page color photos are fabulous.  But the information is a bit shallow and rather strangely organized.  Each page offers two to three sentences about a different animal that happens to be green.  There’s no real consistency about the type of information offered on each animal.  It doesn’t specifically focus on how their greenness is significant, though a sentence in the back of the book does state that mostly green is used for camouflage.

The illustrations are really cute, but the story falls a bit flat.  As a bunch of kids set off to trick-or-treat, one of the little girls is startled to notice the moon is disappearing (behind some clouds).  Her big brother (?) declares that he, as Sorcerer of Space, is the only one who can save the moon.  Gretchen tags along as his sidekick and together they climb a ladder to the moon and discover that it is being eaten by jack-o-lanterns, from which they save it before returning to trick-or-treating. Not much of anything in the way of character development.

It begins with a porcupine having a picnic, eating some clover.  Then a series of random animals ask to join him, to which he is agreeable, but none of them ever want to share his clover. Instead they say what they will eat instead.  The final animal invited to join the picnic is a tiger, and when asked what he will eat, he declares, “all of you!” and that’s when the story ends.  The pictures are cute (big eyes on giraffe), but the ending is a bit startling, and may freak out some kids.  A final information page at the end does explain that this story couldn’t really happen because the animals come from all different places, but nobody ever reads that part.  There’s a lot of repetition in the text, but not really consistently enough to make it predictable for emergent readers.

A reasonable choice if you are looking for early readers about ocean animals.  The binding is sturdy.  The text is simple and direct. It’s got full-color photos and all the usual non-fiction text features.  It’s nature as an early reader puts some limits on the depth of information included, but it’s not completely wimpy in this regard.  One flaw I think young students would find confusing is on the pages where it is trying to show the lengths of the smallest and longest seahorses in comparison to other everyday objects:  the illustrations and the information don’t coincide — the smallest seahorse is described as .5 inches, in comparison to a penny, labeled as .75 inches, and yet the picture of the seahorse is bigger than the picture of the penny; the pictures of the smallest and largest seahorses (labeled as .5 inches and 12 inches, respectively, compared to a penny and a basketball respectively), are identical in size. Little kids will be confused by this.

Set in Boston in 1959, this story is told from the perspective of a young African American boy who is waiting to see his favorite baseball team, the Red Sox become integrated, and the joy he and his family felt when Pumpsie Green took to the field.  An author’s note in the back points out that it took 12 years after Jackie Robinson for all the professional baseball teams to open their ranks to blacks.  It shares a bit about the racism he and his family experienced at the ball park, too.  It certainly has a place, sharing a bit of history that tends to be overlooked.  I would have liked it better if it shared more about Pumpsie himself.

I admit I’m biased:  I pretty much love all Steve Jenkins’ books.  The one limitation of this one is that it is limited to very young students.  It is set up as a guessing book: a two page spread illustrates many features of a particular animal and asks, “Who Am I?” and the following two page spread answers the question, showing an illustration of the whole animal.  The guessing part is really targeting PreK-K kids, as the features given as clues make the guessing pretty obvious.  The predictability and illustrations to support the text extend the usefulness to emergent readers in first grade.  There are some information pages in the back that add a little more meat to the substance offered on each animal.

It’s one of those how-to-adapt-to-a-new-baby-in-the-house stories. Leon is not sure where his new little brother is going to fit in their lives:  can’t be on mom’s lap, as there’s only room for Leon there; can’t be in mama’s arms (they’re just the right size for cuddling him, so obviously too big to cuddle a tiny baby); can’t be between mom and dad while holding hands (Leon holds both); can’t be on dad’s shoulders like Leon (baby’s too tiny).  After much hemming and hawing, Leon is about to conclude they have no place to put a new baby in their home, when he realizes his own arms are just the right size to snuggle a baby.  The illustrations are simple and child-like.

The illustrations are gorgeous — rich, saturated jewel tones.  The story is told in rhyme, beginning in the ancient days of cathedral building, describing the purpose of gargoyles to stand watch and keep evil spirits away, before fast-forwarding to the days when folks had forgotten the original purpose of the gargoyles, seeing them as ugly demons.  As the story continues, we see how hurt the gargoyles are when they overhear what people think of them, but we see too that angels see the gargoyles’ pain, and venture near to ease it.  One stormy night the angels come help the gargoyles take flight over the earth below, where they see others who feel lonely, but they are able to see that they aren’t truly alone:  each seemingly unwanted soul is being loved and guided and cherished by an angel of his/her own.  I do have one gripe with this book.  I’m sure as an artist, the author had a very good reason for making the decision he did, but as an educator, I am frustrated that there is not one single capital letter in the entire text — a poor example for young students who struggle with proper grammar rules already.

It’s a high-interest topic (aircraft carriers), and a highly-appealing format (the hard-cover book begins with a code that matches it to an online, bilingual e-book).  The introductory page offers instructions for accessing the ebook in both languages (English and Spanish).  The rest of the text of the book is in Spanish only.  The text is simple, and well-supported by the full-page color photos.  Useful both as a tool for Spanish-speaking students who are beginning readers, as well as for those who are learning Spanish.

Ah, the power of a comma! This is a story meant to mislead until the twist at the end.  The story unfolds with the fox family tending their garden and declaring it’s time for their prize-winning rabbit stew.  As they list off all the ingredients they’ll need, the illustrations show the worried rabbit watching the foxes gather said ingredients.  And then in the end, we see that they’ve gathered all this lovely food for their favorite Rabbit, Stew, and his family too.  So it turns out Stew isn’t the main dish, but the recipients of this feast.

It’s cute and it’s relatable.  When the main character spills juice all over a chair, she’s so distressed she decides to run away to the library until she’s grown up.  On the way to the library, she meets a number of friends with their own disasters, who decide to join her. After a series of catastrophes piling up like a chain of dominoes dropping on each other, a little bird interrupts her cries of calamity to remind her that it was just an accident, which we’ve seen through the story, can happen to anyone. Instead of running away, our main character learns to apologize and make things better.