Highly readable and highly informative.  It covers everything from the lore that surrounds owls from a variety of cultures, to the different types, anatomy, hunting, and mating.  A generally all-encompassing book, illustrated with beautiful watercolors that support text.

This is a book where the illustrations are crucial to telling the story. Told from the perspective of a solitary fox, the story opens with the words, “This is the forest where I lived with my family.”  Yet the illustration shows a suburban subdivision.  As the book continues, the fox reminisces about the times with his family, while he wanders through the human habitat.  The color scheme of the illustrations does an excellent job of contributing to the mood of the story, opening with dark and drab colors, brightening in the end, when the fox watches the strange two-leg humans digging near signs of a future wildlife preserve and a future wildlife underpass.  When his curiosity draws him through this strange empty burrow, he finds his way home, reunited with his family.  An author’s note in the back discusses conservation efforts working to minimize the impact of human encroachment on wild habitat.

A fun book for exploring language — namely words that have multiple meanings, both as nouns (specifically animals) and verbs.  Each page contains one very short sentence consisting of repeating words (Bats bat. Steers steer. Dogs dog dogs.), and silly, cartoonish illustrations that support the multiple meanings.  Just to be extra clear, within each illustration is also a brief definition of the verb (“to steer = to guide”).  A two-page spread in the very back offers further discourse on the origins of the different usages of each word, in case anyone is particularly curious.

It’s fun.  It’s a rhyming story, a counting story, and a build-upon-itself repeating story.  It begins in the middle of the sea with nothing to see; then there’s nothing to see but one tiny island just big enough for me and Annie McPhee; then two wee dogs who thought they were frogs, followed by three perky pigs wearing wigs….By the time they’ve spotted ten rascally rats skipping in hats, Annie McPhee shouts, “Too crowded for me!” and the two original island inhabitants set off to sea on the head of a whale, leaving the tiny island to the rest of the crowd.

It’s okay.  The illustrations are cute.  The theme is a popular one in children’s lit:  the fun to be had in exercising one’s imagination.  It tells of a young boy and elderly neighbor and all they imagine from her front porch swing (the cat that casts a shadow of a tiger, the tree root they imagine to be a dangerous snake in the grass, etc.) But I think there are better books that follow the same theme.  This one lacks much in the way of pizzaz or story arc.

The illustrations alone are enough to recommend this book.  They are beautiful and charming and fanciful.  The story is a bit heavy: an  allegory describing all the troubles that arise as Mother Nature keeps trying to make children of her own (by the names of Fear, Hate, Greed, Envy & Fickle), and then leaving them in the charge of the humans while she goes off to create the seasons.  Every time she returns, it’s to disastrous results, until she creates a set of twins, who managed to bring everyone else together in harmony (most of the time), whom she named Love.  Not exactly a light-hearted tale, but one that gives children a way to ponder some big ideas.

A charming story, told in rhyme, with really cute illustrations, makes the reader think twice about all the classic bad-guy characters.  In this book, the witches, trolls, dragons, giants, etc. are not really evil through and through — that’s just their day job.  In this book we see them gathering together at the end of the day, commiserating over their daily challenges, setting aside their grumbly ways, brushing teeth, reading stories, checking for princesses under the beds.  A good conversation starter to make one consider characters’ lives outside the stories.

It follows a fairly standard format of similar non-fiction counting books:  it’s got larger print offering a couple lines of rhyming text on each page that indicate how each number relates to octopuses, and then smaller text offers a paragraph or two elaborating on the original statement.  The illustrations are rather Steven Jenkins-ish, which attract young readers, and the text presents its information in a simple, direct manner, easy for young readers to comprehend.  The first nine numbers state assorted facts about octopuses; and number ten lists and describes ten different types of octopuses, including scale images to show their sizes relatives to humans.  The octopus crafts outlined on the final two pages seem a bit superfluous, but other than that it’s a solid choice for beginning informational text.

Somehow it seems almost sacrilege to give a Patricia Polacco book anything less than a Recommendation.  And I suppose this would be a worthy book to have if you want to have the complete works for an author study, but as Patricia Polacco books go, I was a bit disappointed.  It’s long and rambling and doesn’t seem to have a point other than telling the story of a woman for whom Thursday was lucky.  It tells about all the good things that happened on Thursday: being born, meeting the love of her life, sons being born, opening a diner, discovering her signature dish.  After her husband dies, she loses heart and closes her diner, until one day (on a Thursday) she discovers a kitten abandoned and wrapped in a towel with Thursday stitched on it, so naturally she names the kitten Thursday, and gradually she returns to cooking, reopens her diner, and on a Thursday a famous critic tastes a dish that came about because the cat knocked a bunch of ingredients together, and so she becomes rich and famous.  It’s okay, but it was a bit disappointing. I wanted it to have more purpose.

The simplicity of the story relegates it to the youngest readers, but there is lots of repetition in the text, which makes it especially appropriate for those students, as a scaffold for emergent readers.  The simplicity and matted color palette of the illustrations suit the story — that of a young owl who wakes up one evening excited to play, packs up his wagon, and sets off to find a friend to play with; unfortunately, all of his friends are sleepy, so he uses the items in his wagon to help tuck his friends in, and heads home at daybreak, sad that he was unable to find a playmate, only to find all his friends  newly awake, waiting at his home to play.  Of course, now he’s sleepy and must turn them down in like fashion (until after his nap).