It’s got a good sturdy binding, and a solid amount of well-organized information packed into a book designed for early readers. Too often the effort to keep the text simple results in limited information. This book finds a good balance. The chapters make sense. The use of non-fiction text features, such as charts, glossary, table of contents, etc. is done well, rather than seeming like a forced add-on, as is also a frequent pitfall of early-reader non-fiction.

I kind of want to give it a Not Recommended rating, but I’m afraid my personal biases might be shading my opinion a bit, so I shall soften my opinion to an Alternate Purchase. I know it’s trying to honor the imagination of youth. It tells of a boy who wakes up one morning not wanting to be a boy, but to be a bear, wild and free. He proceeds to move through his day protesting any and all of the usual constraints on humans that are interfering with his desire to be wild and free, including the need to wear clothes and shoes. Mom manages to convince him of the benefits of clothes during cold weather, but sends him off to school with his shoes in his backpack instead of on his feet, where continues to protest the rules. The illustrations show him throwing things, including chairs, and hitting other students in line in his imagined bear state. As someone who deals with too much bear-like behavior from students on a regular basis, I don’t feel like I can recommend a book that encourages kids to just go with their feelings about such things.

It’s a celebration of the little, ordinary joys of everyday life: family, community, memories, traditions, etc. Told from the perspective of a young girl, she tells of her father-daughter ritual each evening when her Papi comes home from work and takes her for a ride around their neighborhood on his motorcycle. Throughout their ride, she narrates about the people and places they pass, and the significance each holds in her life. The soft, sunset-ish colors in the illustration, and the nostalgic tone of the text add a sense of the cherished to the ordinary.

There has to be better options available. The opening pages tell about the mail carrier getting stung by icy wind and not letting the cold weather stop him. I’m sure the mail carriers in Florida rarely face such an issue. Later it tells about how the mail carriers sort the mail at the post office before loading it into trucks and their mailbags. Yet I am pretty sure that large urban post offices have different people doing the sorting than the ones making the deliveries, and possibly even different folks loading the trucks. I don’t believe in over-simplifying when writing for small children. Simple, straightforward text is one thing, but simplifying to the point of distorting the facts is not fair to young readers.

It’s a picture book biography of Robert Goddard, the “Father of US Rocketry.” After reading the subtitle, and knowing about the space race of the 1950s and 60s, I was surprised to learn that Mr. Goddard was born in the 1880s. It shares that because of childhood illness he was to sick to attend a regular school, but he pursued his interest in science via at-home science equipment and a subscription to Scientific American. It describes a variety of failed experiments, but demonstrates how he learned from his failures and persisted in new attempts. There was only one line I found confusing: the book refers to his successful rocket of 1926 as “rocket number four,” even though the preceding pages described his first three attempts, and then goes on to include tell us that “year after year, rocket after rocket…each failure taught Robert something new.” The message of years of persisting through failures is undermined when they suggest it was the fourth try that worked.

It’s fine, but it feels like it’s been done before. It’s your basic, “What do the zoo animals do all night?” book. I’m sure none of us will be surprised to know they have a dance party when no one’s looking. It does a decent job of including a bit of rhythm and rhyme. The illustrations are colorful and fun.

It’s got a reasonable amount of information for a beginning reader. When one glances at the table of content, it looks like it’s got about 5-6 chapters, until you look closely and realize 4 of the 6 sections listed refer to the Non-Fiction text features included on the last three pages (More Facts, Glossary, Index, Online Resources). It really just has the two chapters: Bulldozers, which describes the different parts of the machines, and Different Jobs, which describes exactly what it says. It gets points for including a photo of a young woman as the bulldozer operator, and for including details about why the different parts are designed as they are. And it has a sturdy binding.

It’s got some information. It points out different kinds of bus drivers (some drive passengers to work or to school or on tours). It points out their responsibilities for keeping passengers safe, maintaining their buses (though to all bus drivers do that themselves?), and keeping to schedules. But it makes some cheerfully general statements that make me question: the book starts off with a girl getting on a bus for her first time and states that the driver helps her find friends. Really? Or did the driver help her find a seat, and if she happens to make friends with the others nearby, that’s pretty much dependent on luck. Do all drivers drive the same routes daily? Or do they sometimes cover for someone who is sick or take a tour group to a new destination?

This book is completely weak on information. There is nothing that a student is going to learn from this book if they have already spent a whole day in a classroom. It completely over-simplifies the job of teachers. I realize they are trying to keep things simple for early readers, but by spending 24 pages to tell readers things they already know this book just reinforces the belief some struggling readers hold that reading holds no purpose.

Seriously, this book is just encouraging kids to keep junk. When George starts out to help clean up the neighborhood, he ends up deciding he wants to keep everything he found. When the man explains that a collection is one particular kind of thing, and asks George to choose one particular kind of thing to keep and to throw out the rest, George wants to keep it all, so he just arranges it all by color and and calls it a color collection. It’s still junk: a broken mug is still a broken mug, and a single high-heeled shoe still serves him no purpose, and it’s all still all over the living room floor of their apartment; but somehow we’re supposed to be impressed that he turned trash into something “beautiful”?