A good, solid, age-appropriate science text for early learners: it uses simple text, and uses color photos well to support that text.  It manages to make some big vocabulary clearly understandable (opaque, translucent, transparent).  It uses examples that will be readily familiar to small children to make its  points. And it’s got a good sturdy binding, too.

It’s got a good sturdy binding, but it’s pretty useless for teaching kids the vocabulary it’s trying to teach.  The only page that tells what words mean is the two-age dictionary spread in the back, which kids aren’t going to look at.  The main body of the book has some lovely color photos of smiling people, labeled with French family terminology, but there are not clues in either the text or the photos to indicate who these people are, other than age and gender. Parents, aunt, uncle, and stepparents are pretty indistinguishable, as are cousins, siblings, and friends.  Demi-soeur is listed in the dictionary as stepsister, but given what I know about complicated families and word origins, it makes me wonder whether the French use the same word for both stepsister and half-sister??

I love the illustrations.  They are absolutely charming and sweet, but I’m afraid the story doesn’t match up.  It’s a rather long, babbling story about a housewife quail and her day with her seven chicks, hiding under a bush to stay cool, preparing for a picnic, visiting their aunt, taking a bath, and going to bed.  For some unknown reason the text occasionally changes color, but there doesn’t seem to be any discernible pattern as to why.  There’s just nothing about it to make the reader care about what the quails are up to.

There’s not enough information in this volume to give it any real substance.  It is basically a chronological list of the first computers, with dates and names of inventors.  The full-page photos that accompany the text are useful, but the one showing the computer invented in 1975 is sitting on a shelf with a 2001 edition book. And once again we have book including a “timeline” in which the spacing along the line is completely misrepresentative of the time involved.

The illustrations are fun, but the story is a bit flat.  It basically show’s Nina following her ears through the woods, each sound leading her to a new group of friends who is up to something, but they all seem to be acting a bit strange/secretive.  In the end, she hears them all gathering for a surprise party for her birthday.  Basically it seems like a story that’s already been done, without something to make it stand out from the crowd.

In this first-day-of-school story, young Migs learns lessons about over-coming shyness, respecting others’ space, making amends, and making friends.  At first he’s so shy he doesn’t want to go to school, but the dress-up corner helps him create a super-hero costume that helps boost his nerve.  Unfortunately, he feels so powerful he starts racing around the room, ends up crashing into another student and destroying his artwork.  His first attempts to fix the tear just make things worse and worse, and Migs resorts to hiding again, but then he enlists the help of other students to bring the ruined artwork to life, breaking the ice with all, so that in the end he’s eager to return.  The illustrations are bright and cheerful; the problems are ones many kids can relate to.  The rhyming text is occasionally stilted, but generally works.

Like other books by this pair, it’s got cute illustrations to draw the kids in and a good message delivered through a story appealing enough to make the message palatable.  The message in this one: the perils of being a slob.  Sentenced to his room until he’s willing to pick up after himself, young Angus quite contentedly continues making messes, until a mountain of mess begins to grow on his bed, requiring him to use his climbing gear to get to the top to sleep each night.  But as the mountain of mess continues to grow, Angus finds himself approaching the surface of the loch, bringing him into range of scary land-monsters, which finally gives him the motivation to tidy up.

Chronicling the last five minutes of playground time, the illustrations flash back and forth between what is going on in Zoe’s imagination (trekking through the jungle as a great explorer in search of the Addiebeast) and scenes of the playground, where she is chasing her best friend, Addie, as mom offers the minute-by-minute count-down before it’s time to leave. There’s a good parallel between imagination and playground: walking across a log in the jungle shows up as walking on a bench in the playground, etc.  It’s cute.

I like the story:  Amelia and her doll are best friends, and it lists all the many things they would do together, until the day of Princess Sparkle-Heart’s “accident;”  then it goes on to describe the process of putting the doll back together (adding stuffing, choosing new buttons for eyes, etc.) until in the end, she’s better than ever.  I like how the illustrations expand on the text to add dimension to the story:  through the illustrations we see the dog growling at all the things Amelia and her doll do together, we see the “accident” amounted to the dog chewing the doll to bits, and we see that when she’s put back together, she’s been transformed into something that scares the dog away.  But I still find the garishness of the illustrations a bit off-putting, which keeps it from getting a full recommendation.

A very sentimental selection with soft watercolor illustrations with a father waxing poetical about the red shoes he tied on his child, pondering all the things they may do together while wearing those shoes, and how long it’s been since the first steps taken in those shoes.  The real audience seems to be the parent, more than the child, but perhaps suitable for very young children sharing that loving read-aloud time with mom or dad.