Well, it’s title is in sparkly letters and it’s about unicorns, so you already know it’s going to be a hit with young readers. But I like it for the way it celebrates imagination. I like the way the text and illustrations play against each other, adding to the reader’s understanding. The text describes the setting as a magic forest; the illustrations show a backyard scene on the edge of some woods. When the text describes castles and magic wands, the illustrations show a tree house and a stick. The story tells of our young heroine stumbling upon a group of tiny magic horses who are learning to fly (and who look suspiciously like bunny rabbits), and discovering one who is sad because it can’t fly. After doing everything she can think of to cheer it up and help it, she decides to make him an ice cream cone, but she’s in such a hurry to take it to him that she’s running, she trips, and the cone lands on the “horse’s” head, which he turns out to like very much and is suddenly inspired to fly. So it’s essentially this author’s version of the unicorns’ origin story.

It’s a poem celebrating self-affirmation, recognizing and honoring all the things that make us each fabulous. I’m sorry to be redundant, but I can’t think of a better word: this book is unabashedly celebratory. It doesn’t just celebrate the big things, like wanting to be an astronaut, but all the little things, too, like making a great paper airplane and telling someone “bless you” when they sneeze. The illustrations are oil paintings that are vibrant and full of personality and offset the text beautifully, adding to the mood created by the text.

The illustrations are beautiful, as are the life-lessons conveyed. The book opens by reminding readers that, “School is not the only place to find a teacher.” The author then goes on to share a variety of life lessons learned from her careful observations of the animal kingdom. Gorillas taught her to respect others, Lions and tigers and sharks taught her not to be afraid, a tarantula taught her to love little lives, etc. It’s a gem!

The illustrations are bright and cheerful (and I like that the garden setting is showed as an urban rooftop garden). The text is simple (one sentence per page), and rhyming. For a garden enthusiast family, it might make a good bedtime story, but the audience really is targeting very young kids, and I’m not sure how many of them are going to care about anthropomorphized veggies calling it a day. It does use a good variety of verbs, so could be useful that way.

The publisher’s recommendation says this is a K-3 book, but I think it’s really one of those picture books better suited to older students, so I said I would recommend it for grades 2-5. Though listed as a picture book, rather than as non-fiction, it is the true story of the first woman to ride a motorcycle around the world alone, in 1973. Though never named within the body of the story (simply referred to as “she” or “the girl”), the author’s note in the back tells us that it was Anne-France Dautheville who set out from Paris, carrying only essentials. She loaded her motorcycle onto a plane to fly to Canada, drove from coast to coast across Canada and into Alaska before flying again to Tokyo, and then Bombay. The story describes her route, driving through India and Afghanistan and Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany, but mostly it describes her experiences of camping and meeting people and experiencing new places and foods. It’s more about setting the mood of adventure and exploration and independence and connecting with the world than a chronology of specific events. It really makes one want to take to the open road and go exploring.

Not every child lives in a place where they tap their own maple syrup from the trees, but every child has experience WAITING. And every child knows how time seems to go so slowly when you’re waiting. This book does a good job of conveying that, as well as a child’s attempts to see if he can speed things along: when dad says it won’t be time until the weather gets warmer, Ethan tries to convince himself that a sunny day means he can leave off his hat and scarf and mittens, only to discover that sunny doesn’t necessarily mean warm. When dad says it won’t be until the nights get shorter, Ethan realizes he can’t control that either. His final means of measuring time comes when he discovers a loose tooth, and dad predicts it will come out about the time the sap starts running, and it does!

On the one hand, I can sometimes be a bit reluctant to spend a lot of money on non-fiction for emergent readers, because they can be a bit weak on information. But those early readers need non-fiction, too, and this one earns a lot of points on the cute factor. How can baby hippopotamuses be so ugly and so cute at the same time? With only one or two sentences per two-page spread, the information is indeed limited, but it still manages to cover all the basics, and the beautiful, full-color photos do a great job of supporting the text for beginning readers. My level of Spanish probably puts me on a par with emergent readers in this instance, and I was able to work my way through with a fairly solid level of understanding. And it’s got a good, sturdy binding, too.

This is a beautiful book! The illustrations are bright and celebratory. The story celebrates diversity, while recognizing that many children face challenges that make them feel different from their peer. As a group of children work together to plant a garden, each one in turns shares a personal story of challenge (diabetes, autism, asthma, allergies, wheelchairs, blindness, deafness), yet the questions that transition from one child to the next also serve as a link connecting them in their diversity. In the end, the parallel is explicitly pointed out that the garden they’ve built is full of a variety of different kinds of plants, and how boring would it be if it was all the same.

It’s a dual-language book, sharing the story in both English and Spanish. It tells about a young girl attending a Bomba dance class that she’s not real excited about at first. She’s anxious and highly self-critical. She stands behind the best dancer in the class, ostensibly so she can watch her and follow her lead, but really she just compares herself to the older girl. When she hears she’s going to be invited to perform a solo in front of her classmates, she’s so riddled with anxiety that she is not able to pay attention to those performing before her. When she actually gets started she focuses on the rhythm of the drum and gets lost in the drum and does great. It’s an okay story. I just thought it was a bit disjointed, without clear connections drawn as to what led to her change of attitude.

It’s a cautionary tale, a reminder of human messes. It doesn’t focus on how oil is made or what it is used for. It tells how it is pumped from beneath the earth and sent through a pipeline that runs 800 miles through what was once wilderness. It tells how it is pumped onto enormous ships, and how one night the Exxon Valez ran aground and spilled its cargo of oil into the ocean, where it spread for months over thousands of miles of ocean, killing sea birds and otters, and coating shorelines. It tells that thirty years later the place where it happened has never fully recovered.