The illustrations are bright and cheerful and will invite young readers in, especially those who will be drawn to these familiar characters from other picture books by the same author.  The story is simple, yet shares a positive message about persistence and looking for different ways to achieve one’s goals.  The story opens with Bear wishing he could fly so that he could swoop and glide and feel the wind in his fur.  Goose wishes he could help, but does not see how it would be possible, while Fox is full of ideas.  Finally Bear is able to achieve his goals of swooping a gliding by dancing instead, which Goose declares is “like flying, but with your feet on the ground. Mostly.”

If you have a significant Spanish speaking population, and/or a group of students trying to learn Spanish, this is a solid choice for an early reader book about cats.  The layout is clean.  The text is simple and straight-forward, well-supported by full-page color photos.  There is only one or two sentences of text per two-page spread, so the information is not in depth, but for vocabulary development, it does a good job of highlighting important words, and offering enough other context within the print and/or photos to allow a reader to deduce meaning.

The illustrations are colorful and fun.  The story allows the reader to read between the lines:  if one pays attention carefully to the reactions of the sideline characters, one realizes that the dragon being described by the main character falls more into the category of imaginary friend.  The story opens with a young boy helping his father build a crib, which happens to be decorated as a castle.  The opening line states, “If you help your dad build a castle, a dragon will move in.”  Throughout the book, a full understanding requires that the reader pay attention to both the pictures and the text to put all the pieces together.  The situation (new baby arriving) is one many young children will relate to, and while I’ve read many books that address the situation, not all of them offer something creative or fun to make them stand out.  This one does.

Although I admit this title is unlikely to draw a high level of interest among your average elementary population, and it’s not exactly a part of the usual core curriculum, so it may not find a huge audience, I still give it a recommendation.  It offers a clear and concise description of how banking and investments work to return interest on money saved, including explaining the differences between different types of savings accounts and different kinds of banking institutions. The examples it offers uses simple numbers, easy for children to understand.  I think it wise that every library collection should have something along this vein to encourage students to understand the value behind saving money.

As is often the case with books designed for early readers, the information in this book is so scant as to leave it lacking interest.  It claims to be designed for a fluent reader, but it still only has a 1-2 sentences per page, and other than the historical information about early cars, much of the other information provided would be things most kids would already know, such as that an automobile is a car, and that most cars run on gasoline, and are made in factories…

A fanciful series of poems all centered around the theme of a circus, from the viewpoint of the circus chef.  The illustrations are equally fanciful, well-matched in style to the text.  Though the poems may be a bit inconsistent, the delights outnumber the duds, and the individual poems are tied together at the end with the final two poems working to connect the others into a comprehensive story.

I confess that my review may perhaps be a bit biased, as I am not naturally inclined to approve of authors who take advantage of copyright holdings to use the characters and style of a deceased author to carry on adding to a series of books without the input of the original author.  This story is a rather pedantic story with an obvious mission: namely to encourage children to recognizing the abilities, rather than the disabilities of kids in wheelchairs.  It lacks the humor of the original stories, in which George’s curiosity lands him into some kind of disaster. There’s nothing bad about this story, but there’s nothing exceptional about it either.

In simple text, supported by color photos, this book does an adequate job of describing different kinds of currency, including cash, checks, and credit cards.  It points out the historical use of shells and stones and beads and beans to serve the same purpose. It explains that most countries have their own kinds of currency, and goes into details describing the different bills and coins of American currency.  It ends with a final “chapter” about using money wisely, discussing the differences between needs and wants, and encouraging the wisdom of avoiding debt.  It’s fine for what it is, but given that it’s intended for early readers, the simplicity of the text limits the depth of the information.

It’s got a sturdy binding, and it does a decent job of clearly and accurately defining a circle, providing lots of color photos of real-world examples, with the circles brightly highlighted.  The examples are ones small children will easily recognize:  wheels on a car, pizza, hula-hoops, etc. But really, how much is there to say about circles?  It seems a bit pricey to spend over $100 and invest the shelf space to buy 6 different books to describe 6 different shapes.  If you’ve got the room and the dough, this series at least doesn’t seem to erroneously include incorrect examples (including spheres with circles, for example).  What I would be particularly curious to know is whether the rectangle book includes squares, as it should, and whether the hexagon and triangle books are careful to include non-regular shapes.

Illustrated by somewhat cartoonish water colors, this picture book biography of our third president is suitable for all ages.  Returning often to Jefferson’s love of farming and making things grow, this book draws many parallels between this passion of his and how it influenced his many roles in government.  From planting the first seeds of independence as author of the Declaration of Independence, to growing America’s economy and sharing it’s natural riches with the world, while seeking new varieties abroad, as minister to France; from his experiments and inventions in support of agriculture, to doubling the size of the young nation with the Louisiana Purchase and the exploration, everything is presented as different manifestations of the same theme of nurturing and seeking growth, sprinkled with quotes of his own writing throughout the illustrations.  An end-note does share the controversial contradiction of his role as slave-owner who declared, “all men are created equal,” without trying to justify or explain it away — simply recognizing it as another facet of this complex man, leaving the judgments to the reader.