A sweet, simple story, useful for addressing bullying problems.  Carly and Sandy are two sisters who enjoy playing together until a new neighbor moves into the neighborhood.  Lily Jean seems to enjoy being on a power trip, and only wants to play with Sandy.  She will only allow Carly to play if she takes on the demeaning roles Lily assigns.  Sandy sort of half-hearedly tries to stick up for Carly a few times, but gets over-ruled.  In the end, when Lily Jean tries to exclude Carly altogether and tells Sandy to come over to her house to play, Sandy finally says no, and insists she’s going to stay and play with Sandy.  Then Lily Jean wants to play badly enough she declares she’ll be anything they want, so Carly and Sandy demand she be nice, and she agrees.  Though perhaps unrealistically simplistic in finding resolution to a big problem that is usually not so easily solved, it is a good conversation starter, and illustrates well how easily bullying can get started.

This was not as painful to read as I expected it to be.  I picked it up because I knew I have students who are interested in the series, but I thought it would be a real chore for me to read.  Though I certainly wouldn’t call it great literature (a bit cheesy, two-dimensional characters, predictable plot), it was really a reasonable, nice little undemanding story for those who aren’t really strong readers. While it’s able to build off the popularity of the Disney movies on which it is based, I would certainly recommend having it in your collection for those fans.  However, though the binding on Spotlight’s edition is certainly nice and sturdy, I doubt the popularity of the series is likely to last as long as this binding, so I probably wouldn’t bother investing in the reinforced library bound unless you really expect a lot of hard wear and tear — probably the paperbacks would suffice long enough.

Beautiful illustrations of painted paper collage support this story as Lucky Mouse recounts for his friend Lucy all the ways his lucky feather has proven itself lucky since he found it.  Lucy is skeptical — to her, each incident sounds like coincidence or bad luck, etc.  But each time Lucky is able to correct her and explain just why it was really good luck.  In the end, when the lucky feather saves them both, Lucky presents it as a gift to Lucy.  A delightful tale about looking on the bright side.

Often I don’t like when books mix English and Spanish, but this book does so in a very deliberate way, which helps to teach a few Spanish words in a mostly English text.  Building off a repeating pattern, similar to “This Is the House that Jack Built,” each new phrase is first introduced in English, and then subsequently repeated with the nouns in Spanish.  Picture clues in the illustration support comprehension of the new vocabulary.  By the end of the story all the ingredients have been added to the pot to form rice pudding, which the farm maiden shares with all those who helped contribute.  At the back of the book is a recipe for rice pudding and a glossary of the Spanish vocabulary used in the story. It’s bright & cheerful & fun, and could be useful for language learners, both English and Spanish.

A few Spanish words are sprinkled throughout mostly English text as a young girl describes some of the things found in her barrio, or neighborhood, the last of which are paletas in every color of the sarape.  The bright, bold illustrations to support the text, so that readers unfamiliar with the Spanish words would be able to use picture clues and context to deduce their meaning (an just in case, there’s a glossary in the back).  The bulk of the book consists of the young girl listing all that one can do with a paleta (similar to a popsicle), including painting your tongue and cooling down and learning to make tough decisions.

Told from the perspective and in the voice of a preschooler who’s having a sleepover at Gramma’s house, it tells of her excitement and preparations and all the things they do together.  Because it’s being told in the preschooler’s voice, it’s full of baby-talk and it’s poorly punctuated, making it difficult to read aloud.  I wasn’t impressed.

The interplay between text and illustrations in this story is important, as it is a tale about imaginary play.  Basically, it is the story of two sisters having a campout in their back yard, but that’s just on the surface.  In the world of imagination, it is a princess setting off with her panther to cross deserts and drink from wide blue lakes and pitch their silk tent in the night to keep out the leaf-snakes and the owl-witch and the frog-monster.  Throughout all the adventures, the princess (i.e. big sister) is brave, and the panther (i.e. little sister) tries to be.  In the illustrations the reader gets to connect reality to imagination:  the wagon on one page becomes a camel on the next, the wading pool becomes the sea, the grand red silk tent becomes a blanket thrown over a rope, etc.  A good story for encouraging imaginary play and acknowledging that backyard sleepovers can be a bit scary if you let your imagination run loose.

A great book for teaching young children that monsters aren’t real, it tells of a young boy walking alone through a forest where people say there lives a terrible monster.  He acknowledges the existence of bears and wolves and snakes in the forest, but he’s not afraid of them because he knows they aren’t really interested in attacking him.  Much of the story consists of the boy’ dialogue with the monster who is following him, trying to convince him he should be scared, but the boy keeps walking calmly along, insisting he doesn’t believe in the monster.  Eventually, as the monster fails to convince the boy to believe in him, he grows smaller, until he starts to look like a kitten, as he begs the boy to believe in him just a little bit.  In the end the boy picks up the kitten, agrees that maybe he could believe in him just a little bit, and asks his mom if he can keep the kitten he found in the forest.  The writing in the story is good: it’s got good voice and fluency, and it does a great job using text features such as larger, bolder print to help it be read aloud with expression.  The trouble is with the illustrations, which I found rather off-putting.  I think if I were to use it with a group of students, I would choose not to show them the illustrations and ask them to use their own imagination to create mind pictures that go with the words — maybe even have them draw their own illustrations.

When sister and brother, Susi and Bobby, are outside playing one day, they discover a yellow butterfly that sings.  They are so amazed that they share their experience with their grandfather at dinner, who in turn shares a legend that says that yellow butterflies are magical and can grant wishes, if those wishes come from the heart.  Bobby and Susi immediately start plotting and planning what they’d like to wish for, and spend days trying to catch the butterfly.  When they finally catch it in their net, they start spouting their wishes, but get no response and notice that the butterfly is in distress.  Unable to convince her brother to set the butterfly free, Susi wishes the butterfly free, and so it happens.  In gratitude, the free butterfly decides to grant them both a wish, and the story ends there, asking the reader, “What would you wish for?”  It reads aloud well, and would make a great conversation starter, as so many kids love to ponder the ending question, and it has a good message to offer about unselfish actions getting rewarded in the end, but that message is a bit muddled in that Bobby gets granted a wish, too, even though he was the one arguing to keep the butterfly captive.

Spanish and English are mixed in the text, as the author tries to adapt the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas carol to count in spanish, naming gifts from her own Mexican-American traditions.  In the back of the book are notes from the author and illustrator describing how they crafted the book, along with a glossary describing the traditional gifts and translating the numbers.  Unfortunately, the song itself is hard to sing, as the rhythm is somewhat thrown off with the new word choices at times, and I fear that there may be some stereotyping or over-gereralization happening, as many Latin-American cultures vary in their traditions, and one Hispanic friend I consulted was unfamiliar with some of those listed here.  Also, I don’t like the way the two languages were jumbled together.  I will say that the illustrations are bold and colorful.