If you have a population of Haitian students in your school, it might help fill a niche. It is bilingual, and the illustrations are bright and vibrant. But I thought the story felt a little forced. It tells of a young girl after a rough day at school who wanders into an urban garden where a woman is painting a mural and suddenly finds herself transplanted to a garden in San Pedro de Macoris, where a soon-to-be-famous musician asks for her help finishing his song. Then the two fly away to Croix-des-Bouquets to meet a famous artist who asks for Sofi’s help finding just the right shade of purple she needs for her sculpture, before finding herself back in the original garden, where she asks if she can contribute to the mural, and impresses her sister with the purple flower she paints. The way names of certain places and people are mentioned without explanation makes it feel like a tourist book you would buy as a souvenir after having visited those places, but as an independent story I thought it fell a little flat.

It’s a look at science through a poet’s eyes. All the equations in the book specifically focus on the science of Spring, and are even further organized according to early, mid, and late Spring. On each page, an equation is offered in large print, accompanied by a paragraph explaining the equation is smaller print, thereby offering an opportunity to let students ponder the equations and offer their own predictions about what it refers to before reading the author’s interpretation. It invites readers into considering the basic facts of our scientific world in a new way (e.g. “maple trees x buckets + boiling = sticky smile”). The artwork is mixed-media collage and supports the text nicely.

I really love the illustrations: they’re soft and sweet and inviting. I also really love the message it is trying to convey: that each creature plays an important part in the ecosystem, right down to a lowly worm. And I know stories sometimes need to set aside reality to get to the point, but I admit to having trouble suspending my disbelief with this one: just because one worm stopped doing his job, I’m sure there were thousands of others still at it, and it seems like the amount of time it would take for the soil to harden and for the ecosystem to die away and then come back when the worm went back to work would be far longer than the lifespan of a worm. Just saying’.

It’s fine. It tells of a used car salesman who is feeling a bit bored with all his customers on vacation. Things pick up when a series of dinosaurs come in and each drives away in his perfect car. It will get picked up by all those kids who love dinosaur books, but it doesn’t seem to have any purpose other than trying to appeal to kids who like dinosaur books.

It’s really cute. The text tells the story of some toddlers on a pirate adventure, but the illustrations translate that adventure into toddler experiences. When they “sail across the seven seas,” we see the boys on a floatie at the community pool, using part of a pool noodle as their telescope; when their rival pirates “readied their cannons and took aim,” we see water balloons flying through the air. In the end, after being sent to the dungeon (i.e. their separate port-a-cribs under the shade umbrella), they reform their ways…at least some of the time.

It’s kind of a reverse of The Little Red Hen. When a wimpy cook applies to be the king’s chef, it turns out he’s scared of every step along the way, so the king keeps offering to help, and essentially ends up doing it all himself. In the end, the king loves the meal so much, the wimpy young cook gets the job. The illustrations are fun, full of details that invite the reader to linger; they add a lot of personality to the book.

It’s a cute spin on the books to help young children prepare for their first day of school. The narrator is telling a young fairy what to expect on her first day of school, and so many of the things she predicts are similar to things a kindergartener or preschooler might experience, except twisted for the fairy world (e.g. flying to school on a school bird, hanging backpacks on dandelion leaves, sitting crisscross berrysauce, raising her wand when she wants to say something…). Fairies seem to be perpetually popular, and even students who are already well familiar with their own school experience will enjoy for looking for similarities and differences within the fairy world.

It’s a beautiful book. The illustrations are absolutely stunning! It’s a poem that follows a repetitive form, in which each four-line stanza requires a page turn to get to the final line, providing opportunities for predicting what might come next. Unfortunately, I found some stanzas more confusing than others. I know I don’t exactly have a poet’s soul, and I admit to getting caught up on the lack of capitalization or punctuation, but some of the stanzas letting me going, “huh?”

The main body of the book is a series of illustrations of different kinds of lizards, with rhythmic, repetitive, rhyming text asking a series of questions about different behaviors exhibited by these different lizards. Informational pages in the back of the book offer additional information about lizards in general, as well as details about the specific lizards and behaviors mentioned in the main body of the book. My one wish for the book is that the informational blurbs about specific lizards could have been in text boxes directly on the pages illustrating the lizard they discuss. Children are so much more likely to ignore the fine print when it’s at the end of the book, separated from the illustrations.

It’s a series of poems, all imagining what assorted toys and household items get up to when all the people in the house are asleep. The illustrations are bright and child-like and support the imagery of the poems. A wonderful spark for activating kids’ imaginations.