A good story, with believable characters facing real-life situations that a lot of kids can relate to.  The story is told from the perspective of its 10-year-old main character, Piper Lee DeLuna.  Piper’s mom is getting ready to get married again, but Piper is not too happy about it, partly because she’s not especially fond of the girl about to become her stepsister, partly because she doesn’t want to give up the hope that her father might still be alive (his body was never recovered from a plane crash), and partly because she doesn’t want to share her mom.  Throughout the story, Piper makes  a lot of not-so-smart decisions that lead to near disasters, but because it’s told from her perspective the reader gets to see why they all seemed like reasonable ideas at the start, until they never turn out the way she’d hoped.

The writing is stilted. The story is boring. The pictures are fine, if a little bit drab in their color scheme.  It’s like a junior graphic novel, telling of two friends going trick-or-treating.  One is too scared at first, but her buddy assures her that her costume does not need to be a scary one; along the way their bike gets a flat tire at a haunted house, but a ghost helps them repair it, so they make it to their party.

It’s well-constructed, and well-formatted.  That is, it’s got a good sturdy binding and all the important non-fiction text features like index, glossary, map, labels… It’s got nearly-full-page color illustrations that support the text.  I just wish it was better written: one page tells us “some rivers flow down to the ocean,” while another says, “The water flows into the ocean,” which sounds both redundant and contradictory.  Don’t all rivers flow into the ocean (unless they’ve been run dry by over-use before they reach it)? One page tells us, “A river is like a waterslide.”  Without any elaboration/explanation.  Did we really need a whole page dedicated to telling us that, “Rivers are full of water.” ?

The simple text is well-supported by color photos of people from all around the world, showing lots of different types of clothing.  It tells about the different reasons people wear clothes, and describes different types of clothes, as well as telling that some people make their own clothes while others buy theirs.  A map in the back highlights where different photos were taken.  It includes a basic glossary (with photos) and index, and it’s got a really good binding.

It’s sweet.  It’s got those classic David McPhail illustrations.  It lists a whole lot of ways that brothers sometimes differ and sometimes disagree, but they find ways to resolve problems and accept each others differences, and some things they have in common, but no matter what they know they’ll always stick together.  Not so much a story as a sentimental treatise on what it means to be brothers.

It’s just kinda lame.  It rhymes.  It’s a list of farm animals who don’t like doing what the author says they should; they all like doing other stuff.  The only normal thing they’re all good at is sleeping.

The story is one with a good message about not giving up on one’s dreams, as well as one a lot of little girls can probably relate to.  There’s this little bunny who loves to twist and jump and whoosh around her bedroom and really wants to be a ballet dancer, but when she makes the effort to pursue lessons she meets repeated folks who insist there are no bunnies in the ballet.  With persistence she sticks with it, and with the help of one instructor who believes in her she makes it to the the dance of the sugar plum fairy in the Nutcracker, and astounds them all.  Some of the illustrations are really fun and appealing, but they seem a bit inconsistent — some look sloppy and ill executed and off-putting.

It’s got a lot of good information (including current events as recent as 2012), and some great color photos and maps.  I just wish it was a little better organized.  It goes from talking about modern Egypt, to its history, and the back to modern life, and then back to history again.  And given that a lot of terminology may be unfamiliar to young readers from other parts of the world,  it could’ve made better use of photos/illustrations to support the text.  For example, on the page talking about the plants and animals of the region, it includes a full-page color photo of a crocodile (a fairly common animal most kids could picture themselves), and includes nothing to illustrate the ibexes, papyruses or lotuses mentioned in the text. And of course the timeline is not really a timeline, but a flowchart of history.

On the one hand, it’s about a little-known (at least I had never heard of her before) woman in science, from an era when few women were encouraged to pursue such things.  Our kids need to know more about such folks.  I could wish it was better done, though.  It is illustrated with photos from the time (yay, primary sources), but they don’t necessarily do much to support the text.  Because it is written for small children, the text itself is a bit dry, though clear and understandable.  Pet peeve:  it tries to construct a timeline of her life as it goes, but it pays no attention to the spacing along the line as representative of time (there’s more space between the markers separated by one year than there is between those separated by 24 years).

Seriously?  Who is going to want to read this book? Every library has a better way to spend $18.  At least the last two pages of the text finally explain, “That’s how I do my homework.  How would you do it?” Because the beginning seems to imply a lot of assumptions about what homework entails.  And it’s rather stereotypical to picture an Asian child as the example demonstrating good study habits.  But the biggest problem is that it’s just plain boring and pedantic.