In true Scaredy Squirrel fashion, Scaredy Squirrel is petrified of having a party for his birthday, for a whole host of reasons which he carefully outlines.  He then sets forth elaborate plans to have a safe party, protected from all his possible fears.  Of course his plans go awry, but it turns out okay after all.

A really fun story about the disaster that strikes when young Harvey dismisses his mother’s instructions about how important it is that no one draws on Doodle Day.  When mom goes off to the market Harvey decides to go ahead and draw anyway, only to find that everything he draws comes to life in giant size and is out of control.  He keeps trying to solve the problem by drawing something new to catch the last thing he drew, but they’re all out of control and wreaking havoc until mom comes home and draws a mom to order all the doodles back into the book.  It’s fun!

When no one is coming in the pet store, the pets decide to put on a circus, complete with costumes they’ve made themselves, and then all sorts of people come in the store.  There are just a few words per page.  The pictures are fun and cute, but there’s not a whole lot to the story, which limits the target audience to very young students.

Ugh.  This is the third one of these I’ve gotten myself stuck with, and I haven’t liked any of them.  They have a noble purpose, to create stories that teach valued characteristics, but this needs to be done in such a way that does not talk down to students.  There are much better stories that can serve this purpose without being so painfully pedantic and overly-simplified.

It presents itself as non-fiction, but it makes some assumptions in its description of what life would be like as a movie star, glamorizing a career children already have glamorized visions of.  I can’t find a purpose to this book.

Eh.  It’s okay.  The main character is Rhina O’Virus, and it basically tells the story of how a germ invades a body to cause a cold.  The illustrations are bright and cheerful, but not exactly informative.  The story is told in terms of buildings and copy machines and police and parties, but in order to make the connections between the story and the reality of what happens, it’s important to read the straight-forward paragraph on the last page, which mostly kids won’t read. It’s kinda hard to follow.

The illustrations are sweet.  The audience is limited.  The text is simple:  describing all the ways toddler Mimi mimics the grown ups around her, from putting on lipstick like Mommy and slurping soup like Grandpa. In the end, Grandma gives kisses just like Mimi.  It would be recommended for those catering to a pre-school audience, but will hold limited appeal for older kids.

Maybe it would get a ranking of Recommended for a library in the SW, but other than being set in a desert environment, with desert animals as the characters, I don’t find anything else particularly unique about it.  It tells the story of Old Armadillo waiting at home for the trick-or-treaters to come, but he gradually gives up and goes to bed because no one is coming, but outside they are all congregating and waiting for the rest of the gang to arrive.  Then they all ring his bell at once and they all have a party together.  The pictures are rather dark, which was probably intentional to set the Halloween mood, but I actually found them more gloomy than spooky.

A cute story about a baby elephant who’s getting teased by his big sister for not knowing how to squirt dirt or water out of his trunk.  By the end of the story big sister gets squirted right between the eyes.  The illustrations are bold and bright.  A strong additional purchase, bordering on the recommended.

This is the second one of these books I’ve gotten for free from SSBRC, and I haven’t liked either one of them.  I don’t think I’ll pick up any more, even if they are free.  They are really cheesy and pedantic.  Even knowing they are intended for a very young audience (probably strictly PreK, but maybe K at a stretch), I still feel like they read down to kids.  There are better books to teach the lessons with more of an actual story, without being  so preachy.