It’s your basic don’t-give-up-on-your-dreams story.  Santiago dreams of becoming a performer, but at the audition for the school play he freezes.  When he confesses to his dad that he didn’t get the part, dad tells him not to give up on his dreams, so he keeps practicing on his own time, which makes him ready to jump in and save the day when the lead in the play is suddenly ill.  It’s fine.  It’s a good little story, with a good message. Just perhaps a bit of a cliche.

It’s a collection of 21 traditional stories from around the world, mostly fables, each told in 4 pages.  It’s not that it’s bad, exactly.  But there are way better versions available of all these stories.  The format keeps the telling of each to a minimalist bare-bones version, and the illustrations are cute, but not necessarily culturally relevant.

The traditional tales of native peoples are a niche in our libraries which can sometimes be difficult to find.  This story offers an introduction which gives the reader a context for the tale, setting it within the tradition from which it comes.  The illustrations capture the adventurous nature of the story, drawing the reader in.

The real strength of this alphabet book lies in its illustrations, which are bright and stylized and incorporate each of the letters they are representing.  The text is somewhat limited in the information it provides, really more it spark one’s curiosity than to quench it.  It uses a lot of slang of the time and genre, which some readers may find confusing, but it includes a glossary of terms in the back to explain itself.  The two-page introduction at the beginning sets the stage for the rest of the book by offering a basic, straight-forward history of the development of jazz, which even made sense to this musically illiterate reader

On the one hand, when I was 10-12 years old,  I would have been delighted with this book, and anxious to try it all, and I know plenty of girls today who would like it, too.  On the other hand, reading it now as an adult, I can imagine my mom would’ve been very discouraging to my youthful enthusiasm, and now I understand why.  The crafts that are included require expensive and hard to locate items (although, to the book’s credit, they do offer suggestions of where to locate the more obscure items), and are unlikely to turn out quite so tidily as those in the photos.  It would have been helpful if the step-by-step directions included more photo support.

The story is that of the Biblical narration of the first Christmas, with some elaboration to add dialogue and expand on the setting.  What really recommends it are the illustrations — they’re beautiful, full of rich colors and soft edges.

It tells the story behind the creation of the famous Christmas carol, setting the scene in an Austrian village in the early nineteenth century, where the people are downtrodden by war and cold.  It tells a bit about the background of the writer and composer who collaborated to create it, and it tells a bit of how it spread around the world.  The illustrations suit the tone and era of the story.  But it’s not told in the most direct manor, and I’m not sure there’s enough here to compel young readers to be interested.

I don’t know if it’s a problem with the translation, or if it’s the fault of the editor, or if it’s just a cultural difference in story telling.  According to the information on the dust jacket, there are thirteen books published in this series in Japan, which would seem to indicate it was  popular there.  The illustrations are cute, and will attract certain readers, but the story really rambles.  It’s essentially about a community effort to raise funds to restore an old abandoned house that had once been a cafe.  They hold a homemade cake contest, selling pieces of the entries to raise money, then they all work together to rebuild the house, and everyone made themselves at home as they liked.  Except it took a long time to tell it, and the reader is never really sure what the point is.

I like the end papers in this book.  Unfortunately, that’s about all I like about it.  When a young girl wakes up to a horrible hair day, both her parents are too absorbed in their own interests to care, so the girl imagines a bunch of if-only scenarios that would make it better, until at the end she runs home, and this time her mom decides to pay attention and she brushes it.  It’s just a bit odd.

I guess there’s nothing bad about it.  I just couldn’t find much to get excited about, either.  I’m not sure what the point of the books is.  I can tell from the back flap that it is apparently a sequel to Cats Got Talent, and maybe if I had read that one as background, I would care about these further adventures of the cats.  But as it is, there’s here to actually make me care about this trio of cats getting kidnapped by an untrustworthy talent agent who uses trickery to make them famous.