What a beautiful book to celebrate one of humanity’s great scientific achievements.  The end pages at the beginning and end of the book provide just-the-facts context, with diagrams, sequences of events, data, and further information about America’s first trip to the moon.  In between, the story is told.  The text is poetic, and the illustrations help to convey the wonder and humanity of this shared experience to readers who are too young to have shared in it themselves.  A great book to inspire future scientists.

It’s a bit of an odd book.  It its way, it is a book of triumphing over loneliness, I guess.  It tells about a lonely turtle who knows only his own shadow, but decides one day to crawl out of his shell and make renovations to it.  What starts out as a new paint job leads to building a deck with a fireplace, and then planting a garden with a pond, and eventually moving on to building an entire town on the back of his shell.  This draws a whole community of other critters who decide to move in and Turtle isn’t lonely anymore.  The artwork is aiming for child-like, and is really quite successful at that, but the problem with children’s artwork is that it’s often difficult to see what they are actually trying to convey, and in that regard it failed to serve the telling of the story, I thought.

It’s fine, but not as good as I hoped it would be.  For one thing, since it tells me that the telescope came first, shouldn’t the subtitle be “from the telescope to the x-ray”?  The information is brief blurbs about assorted human inventions related to the ways we see, organized by topic, and roughly chronologically.  The accompanying illustrations are cartoonish.  There were a few confusing bits:  each two-page spread, dedicated to a particular topic, has some kind of connect-the-dots trail running through the illustrations, and it took me a few pages to figure that indicates the reading path if you want the information chronologically; if you read following the typical left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, it sometimes comes off a bit disjointed.  There are a few times the illustrations seem a bit disconnected too:  next to the blurb describing the first x-ray, in 1895, as one the inventor took of his wife’s hand, the illustration shows a chest x-ray being taken of a woman wearing shorts? In 1895? Really?

It’s got all the pleasing characteristics of other Llama Llama books, including rhythm and rhyme and fun illustrations, as well as a worthwhile message it’s trying to convey to to young children — in this case the importance of everyone lending a hand with the tidying up chores. When mama ask little Llama to stop playing and to make his bed, he starts off shaking his head, because all he wants to do is play, until he takes some time to image what life would be like of mama also refused to clean and just wanted to play. The problem lies with the lack of any sign of dad in this scenario, and the implication that if Llama doesn’t help all the cleaning responsibilities would fall upon his apron-clad mama: it just smacks of 1950s stereotypes.

If you have a lot of fans of the Froggy books, it might be worth purchasing this one to expand your collection, especially if you’ve also got classes who do pumpkin patch field trips, which is what this one is about. It tells about Froggy and his friends searching for pumpkins as part of a pumpkin picking contest, with prizes for assorted traits (biggest, smallest, prettiest, etc.) And even after dropping his pumpkin at the end of the search, smashing it to bits, Froggy still gets a prize — for ugliest. I’m just a bit tired of the whole everybody-gets-a-prize thing.

It’s more or less your basic, traditional, retelling of he There Little Pigs, with all the usual huffing and puffing and chinny chin chins. What lends this one its unique character is that the three little pigs declare themselves to be obsessed with the desire to be superheroes, to the point of dressing like superheroes. When they set off from home and first arrive in Fairyland, they hear how the local wolf has been tormenting all the local residents. So when they catch the wolf after he climbs down the chimney of the brick house, they turn out to be superheroes to all their neighbors.

My only real beef with this book is the way it short-changes Gertie in the title. The book is all about Manny and Gertie, who spend every Saturday battling imaginary monsters together all around town. Until, in the midst of some of their imaginings in the park, they notice the way litter is impacting the whole park (and especially the turtles in the pond). So they set their efforts into battling the real monsters: litter bugs. As others in the park notice their efforts, they pitch end to lend a hand and everyone benefits. A little cheesy perhaps, but a good message. I just don’t know why Gertie gets no credit?

This story is really series of children introducing themselves as they work together in a garden. Each student has a different challenge s/he describes (diabetes, autism, wheelchairs, blind, deaf, turrets…), as well as things that help them cope with those challenges. Each introduction ends with a question that leads into the next child, creating a sense of connectedness despite their differences, as well as inviting children to connect themselves to the children in the story. The author ends by drawing an analogy between the children and the garden in which they’ve been working, pointing out that it is the differences which enrich both the garden and our world.

It’s a picture book that starts to introduce young children to literature’s use of tangible symbols to represent intangible ideas. It tells us about a hippo who has a big, black, heavy block that she’s been carrying around for quite some time. Each day she drags it with her to the park where she sits on it. Then along comes a happy, dancing alligator surrounded by a cloud of butterflies, who sits with her day after day. When invited to the ocean, our pig friend is concerned that her block is too heavy to carry that far, but her new alligator friend says he and his butterflies can help. Along the way, and during their time beside the sea, hippo tells about an old friend she misses, who has gone away, and finds that her block is shrinking. She says she’ll always have it, but alligator says he’ll help carry it when necessary.

I appreciate the idea of a picture-book biography of someone students might not know about, and one that encourages exercise and healthy eating, but I’ve got several problems with this book. Right off the bat, it begins by telling us that he was a bit of a sickly child, skinny and feeble and frail, and then we turn the page and the next sentence says, “But Friedrich survived.” That seemed like a big jump, as nothing in being described as skinny and frail had seemed life-threatening. My main objection is hidden in the author’s note at the very back of the book, rarely read by children, when the author admits that the subject of his book was known for self-promotion, and there is much doubt over the authenticity of events he presented in the main body of the text as fact.