It tells about a girl who’s expanding her extracurricular horizons. She loves ballet, but after her recital, when the ballet classes end, it’s time for her to try the baseball she signed up for. She misses the twirling and leaping of ballet, as well as her sparkly tutu, and she’s not exactly giving her team her best. Her coach tells her about famous athletes who use ballet to improve their performance in other sports, and he gives her some sparkly shoe laces, and she begins to put in a bit more effort. And then when the ball is headed her way she leaps and twirls and catches the ball that puts the other team out and wins the game.

The illustrations are cute, and the story draws upon a character that will be familiar to many. But with only one sentence on most pages, the storyline and character development are both a bit limited. It basically tells about planning and preparing for a tea party, and then when Angelina drops the special tart she made for the guest of honor, she performs a dance for her instead. I guess it could be useful for recalling sequence, but otherwise it’s a bit blah.

It’s got the basic, very rudimentary information about why earthquakes happen presented in a simple, straight-forward manner. There are only one to two sentences per page, and illustrations to support the meaning of the text. It includes information about how different cultures of the past explained earthquakes before the science behind them was understood.

The story is lame. The writing is stilted. There’s repetition, but no rhythm or rhyme, as the description on the back claims. The questions in the back of the book are trying to turn reading into an assignment, but there’s not enough substance to the story to illicit any authentic questions. This is a tool designed to turn kids off reading.

The rhyming text tells of a cheerful chick who’s got a dream of starting up a barnyard cheer team. She’s made herself an outfit, practiced her moves, thought up her cheers, but when she ventures through the farm to enlist the other animals she is met with a less-than-enthusiastic response. Everyone is busy with their own agendas, and they each send her on her way. What she doesn’t notice is the series of other chicks who are following her throughout the barnyard, watching her every move. Just when she’s about to give up altogether, they joined her, and by then the grown-up animals’ work was through, so they at least served as an audience as the chick cheer team performs.

Based on the family stories handed down by the author’s grandmother, it tells the story of a year in the life of a family during the Great Depression of the 1930s. When a single mother of 8 children gets evicted from their home, they move into a shack in the woods and make it into a home. Granted, it is a very romanticized view of some harsh realities, but one of the points that the author is making (according to the author’s note in the back of the book), was that though times were hard, the memories her relatives carried forth from these times were overwhelmingly good ones. The illustrations certainly contribute to the nostalgic feel of the book, softening the harsh realities.

The text is almost an essay about friendship, a series of truisms. It might seem preachy, except that the topic is one that everyone can relate to, and the things it has to say are things that so many children will have had experience with, so rather than coming off as preachy, it comes across as a recognition and validation of their own experiences, as well as a reminder about how things can turn around. The illustrations help set the tone, being very soft and comforting and sweet.

The tone of the writing is that of a dime-store detective novel, and the cartoonish illustrations present the information in the form of rap sheets, but within this silly format is a lot of substantial information about animals with which many readers may be unfamiliar. The common theme running through to connect the animals that are included is that each exhibits some sort of behavior that could be considered anti-social: the Anglerfish is wanted for illegal fishing, the Common Cuckoo for bad parenting, the llama for assault, etc.

This is a lovely book, useful for discussing adjectives and opposites and changing perspectives. The text is a series of simple declarative sentences describing a young girl’s experiences of the ocean within a single day. The illustrations add to the meaning of the text by showing how she can say back to back that the ocean is both shallow and deep (the part that rushes up on the sand v. the part she jumps into off the end of a pier), and likewise with a whole series of other opposites. One of the things I think adds a special touch to this book is that the illustrations show the main character with hand crutches: there’s no reference to why she needs them, but the readers get to see a girl with some sort of physical impairment going about her life enjoying all the beach experiences without letting her crutches get in the way.

A great book for sharing nursery rhymes with young students, this book can be a fun way to review that which is familiar to some, while introducing famous nursery rhymes to those who don’t yet know them. As the characters are out on a walk, different things they saw throughout their trip remind them of nursery rhymes, which they share. The telling of the story includes lots of its own rhyming and repetition between the nursery rhymes, so there are many opportunities for making the sharing of this book an interactive group experience.