The illustrations seem a little quirky, and personifying the instruments didn’t seem necessary, but the information seemed clear and pertinent.  I don’t know much about musical instruments, but I learned some basics from this book. It seems like an adequate book.

I liked this one.  Usually I don’t have much use for these early-reader non-fiction books, because they generally lack any real substance to the information they provide.  This one just had a sentence or two per page, but it managed to clearly convey all the necessary components to understanding the water cycle.  The text was understandable for young readers, but it still included the appropriate vocabulary — it didn’t talk down to kids.

It’s badly written — highly repetitive and redundant.  It saved the interesting stuff for the last page instead of including it throughout.

It certainly lived up to the title of the series.  There wasn’t a whole lot connecting the different facts included other than that they are all things that make people itch.  The photos and illustrations, combined with the information to give me the heebie-jeebies.  Yuck. A little more substance/organization might have brought it up to a Recommended.

I get the feeling this book isn’t really meant for the audience it’s claiming to be for — I don’t think it’s so much a kids’ book as it is a book for parents who want to raise eco-friendly kids.  Kids who are interested in gardening in the city are going to be more interested in how-tos.  This is more like an anthropological work on the good that gardens can bring to urban environments.  It’s a nicely constructed book, but not likely to have much appeal beyond a niche audience.

This one is just basically a waste of paper.  It doesn’t seem to have anything consistent about it.  I can’t tell what it’s purpose is.  It seems to be a book about finding shapes around us in our daily lives, but most of the text is random information about things that happen to be triangles, even though the information is irrelevant to the fact that they are triangles.  I guess it could be helpful to someone trying to learn English or Spanish, but there are better bilingual books for that.

I almost gave this one a “Recommended.”  It’s got more information that a lot of the non-fiction for early readers.  It does have some interesting facts about some interesting birds.  The piece it doesn’t have that I really wish it did is information about where these different birds can be found, whether in the text or in the form of a map.

It’s yet another early reader text with simple sentences accompanying color photos, and including all the typical non-fiction text features.  It’s shiny, and it’s got a sturdy binding, and it’s just fine for what it is, but I don’t usually invest a lot of my library dollars in this type of thing — long on literacy instructional uses, short on recreational reading interest or information.

Intended for emergent readers, one to two sentences per page accompany color photos, listing different adaptations that forest animals use to either help them hide or help them access food. It’s small in size for the small hands of the intended audience.  The binding is shiny and strong. It’s good for what it is, though not likely to be popular for recreational reading.

Eh. It’s fine I guess.  Nothing really to get excited about, but nothing really to complain about — except maybe that it over generalizes, saying “In fall, plants are ready to be picked.”  I don’t claim to be a farming expert, but I believe there are some crops that are picked at different times of year, and I know there are many farms in parts of the world where they don’t even have our traditional seasons.  But it’s got a good sturdy binding and nice paper.