It’s aiming for sentimental but it just comes off as dull.  The illustrations look sort of washed-out and the story is just as bland: a girl and her grandma making pancakes, but Grandma is disappointed by the jam that doesn’t live up to the jam she remembers from her youth.  Granddaughter asks if they can go together and get some from the old country, but it is too far, so she makes a label for their new jam that says it’s for grandma, “made with love and sunshine.” And somehow the new label makes everything better.

The simplicity of both illustrations and text make it best suited to very young readers.  The illustrations are both sweet and artsy in their simplicity.  The story tells of a girl who gets on a bus with a red balloon, but accidentally let it go.  The bus continues on, picking up a variety of animals, each of whom is asked if they’ve seen the balloon.  Just when they reach it, a bird pops it, but the group cheers up when they notice the bright red setting sun, which looks like another red balloon, which they will get to see again tomorrow.

I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to.  I think this author has got some real potential, and a little more careful editing could’ve made this a really good book.  The general flow of the writing was engaging, and it drew me in, so I started out enjoying it, but part of the problem is that the author wasn’t real clear on what age child she was writing for:  in many respects it felt like a book for upper elementary, but then there were elements of romance and pranks and alcohol that would’ve been better suited to a more middle-school audience.  And then at the end of the book it wrapped up too quickly without fully concluding all the subplot lines that had felt like they were leading somewhere, but apparently didn’t.

This is a good, solid little series.  The basic premise is a brother and sister who have a magic mirror in their basement that lets them slip through into the land of fairy tales.  While there, in an effort to make things better, they realize they’ve actually interfered in some way that will get in the way of reaching happily-ever-after, so they’ve to to work to put things back on track.  In this one they climb up Repunzel’s braid to visit, but Jonah forgets he’s wearing his soccer cleats, which shred her hair.  I like that the stories are accessible to young readers: enough background explanation is woven into the text so that readers can pick up any book in the series and not worry about reading them in order, and the basics of the original fairy tale are included in case they’re not familiar with it.

It’s fine I guess.  The pictures are cute. The story is a bit flat, though.  It basically tells what a little mouse does when he comes up out of his hole in spring, summer, and autumn; but then when he pops out in winter he just goes back down and snuggles in, making use of the things he’s gathered in the other seasons.  The mouse is personified, making bread and soup and reading in his hole, but there’s nothing about it that makes the reader care especially, either about the mouse or about his adventures.

The girl in the sparkly tutu on the cover will be sure to draw a lot of readers, and the story will offer them a good lesson about giving new things a try.  Tallulah is excited about attending dance camp because she’ll get to enjoy her beloved ballet lessons every day, but she’s put out that campers are also expected to take tap lessons, too.  At camp she meets another girl who loves loves the tap classes but hates ballet, which Tallulah just can’t understand.  When the girls get to comparing notes it comes out that they both like the classes at which they excel, but have been turning their noses up at that which was a challenge.  Together they decide that maybe not being the best doesn’t mean they’re the worst either, and that’s okay.

I think this is an important book to have available so that students facing similar circumstances (and there are a lot of them out there), can know they are not alone, that other families are coping with the same struggles.  Told from the point of view of a young girl, it tells of her feelings after her mother has been taken away to stay at a “prison for women without papers.”  It doesn’t sugar-coat things:  when she asks Papa when Mama is coming home, he can’t tell her — only reassures her that Mama loves her very, very much and would never stay away too long if she could help it.  It tells of Papa spending his evening writing letters to judges and politicians and reporters that go unanswered.  It tells of visiting her Mama and how hard it was to leave, and of the tapes Mama is able to send with bedtime stories recorded, which give her comfort.  It does offer a happy ending, which may not be what all children will get, but offers a sense of hope.

I love these books!  This is the third one by this pair I’ve gotten, the others being A Leaf Can Be… and Water Can Be…, and I have loved them all.  The illustrations are fabulous and support the text, which is poetical.  With just a couple words per page, the text serves to list different forms and contexts in which we encounter rocks, from mountains to paving stones to the moon.  In order to make the rhyming work, the words are often figurative, and just in case the illustrations aren’t enough to aid the reader in deducing the author’s meaning, pages in the back of the book offer further explanation for each of the names given to rocks in the main body of the book.  An excellent resource to accompany a unit on rocks, as well as a beautiful choice for casual reading.

It’s got cute illustrations, but the text left me a little flat.  Told in rhyme, it is the story of a mouse who finds a shoe, wanders around trying to find who it belongs to, and when it finally is offered to him by the kangaroo who tossed it because it hurt his feet, the mouse turns it into a bed for himself.  The rhyming seemed a bit forced at times, and lacked the rhythm that makes it easy to read aloud smoothly.

This is a such a natural addition to the Sheep in a Jeep and Sheep in  a Shop collection that I can’t believe it took them this long to create it.  It’s got all the rhyme and alliteration that make the other books such great tools for having emergent readers study word construction.  And the rhythm and rhyme give aid in naturally fluent reading.  And the illustrations are sweet and add to the telling of the story.  It’s a counting book as the collie’s efforts help one more and then one more sheep fall asleep.  And besides, with the reputation sheep have for helping us sleep, it makes a perfect bedtime story.