It’s not bad.  It’s got rhythm and rhyme, and the illustrations are bright and play with perspective a bit.  But I can’t figure out why it got the “Moonbeam” award sticker on its cover.  It can’t claim to have much of a plot. It basically does exactly what the title says, capturing a moment with a family of four sitting on their front porch, with one brother listening to his tunes, one brother drinking a soda, dad snoozing, and mom taking a picture of the moment.  There’s just not much to indicate why we’re supposed to care about this particular family or this particular moment.

An everyday story that reminds us all to be grateful for the things we do have, rather than counting the things we wish for.  It begins as CJ leaves church with his grandmother and waits in the rain to catch a bus.  Throughout their journey, CJ is full of questions and complaints (Why do we have to wait in the rain? Why don’t we have a car? Why do we have to go here after church?), seeming determined to feel sorry for himself, but for each of his negatives, Grandma is able to point out a positive — the drinks the rain provides for the trees, the people they get to know on the bus, etc.  By the end of their journey, CJ is full of wonder at how his nana always fins beauty where he doesn’t think to look, and announces that he’s glad they came, and the illustrations show the readers that he and his helping serve meals to those less fortunate than themselves.

Another fabulous story from the author of Bats at the Library and Bats at the Beach, this one follows the bats as they wake from winter’s hibernation anxious to make a little noise.  Finding a window open at a deserted summer theater, the bats indulge in an evening of music-making.  Told in rhyming verse, with illustrations depicting some bats with actual miniature instruments while others play on improvised hand-made instruments, the story winds its way through the bats’ concert, describing an assortment of different types of instruments and different types of music along the way.  It celebrates music of all kinds.

An absolutely fabulous blend of poetry, science, and art, this book is both beautiful and informative.  Centered around a theme of nature’s adaptations for surviving the harsh conditions of winter, each two-page spread is dedicated to a different animal or plant, with a poem and a scientific blurb describing how that animal adapts.  The illustrations are beautiful and support the text while contributing to the mood of the poems.

For purposes of this review I examined the Farsi-English, Arabic-English, Russian-English, Turkish-English, Italian-English, and Portuguese-English volumes.  Each is designed with clean white pages and labeled photographs organized by category chapters: animals, human body, house, clothing & personal objects, etc.   The same photos are used in each volume, and each volume includes tables of contents, page headings, and indices in both languages, as well as the labels next to each photo being listed in both languages.  The English biases are revealed in that the index is alphabetized according to the English vocabulary; it would have been nice if a second index had been included where the vocabulary was alphabetized according to the other language.  It also would have been nice if a pronunciation guide had been offered for both languages, as only the spelling is included next to the pictures (although there is also a CD included with each volume).  They’re fun for curiosity’s sake, and could be useful in schools with a lot of foreign-languages spoken, as a way of getting some basic vocabulary across, but I’m not sure they are the most useful tools available.

It’s okay as a very introductory text, but the information is limited to a sentence or two per page.  On the front and back covers, and on the title page, the Spanish precedes the English, but on the internal pages, the English comes first.  It seems like it would have made more sense to be consistent one way or the other.  The Spanish is a good translation of the English, and it would make a good tool for beginning language learners of either language, but is less useful for teaching much about weather.

The information is shallow, and the graphics detract, rather than add:  the color photos of the birds in question are surrounded by lots of bright neon colors and patterns, sometimes to the extent of having had the natural backdrop of the bird edited out — it’s rather jarring and distracting, and just plain doesn’t seem to fit.

This is one of those instances (biographies of current sports stars or other celebrities of the day), when I figure it’s not really necessary to invest funds in the solid sturdy library binding:  a cheap paperback will probably last as long as their stardom, and by the time it wears out, there will likely be some other latest celebrity of the day.  I do have to admit the Lionel has a pretty good story (involved in soccer since age three, overcoming health concerns, giving back to his community…).   My biggest gripe with the book is the failure of the photos to support the text.  The first half of the book is talking about his childhood, but all the photos are of his adult soccer career:  the text is talking about when he was three or six or eleven, but the accompanying photo on that page is most definitely not a child — it doesn’t fit.

This is one of those bilingual books that definitely work better in English than in Spanish.  In English, it’s told in rhyming verse, listing different kinds of things that might make someone happy and how it might be expressed.  The translation does an adequate job of expressing the same ideas, but it looses the charm of the rhymes.  Double-page color photo spreads support the text, with lots of multi-cultural kids smiling away.

I have been consistently impressed with books in Scholastic’s True Book series, and this one is no exception.  The text is detailed enough to be truly engaging and informative, yet organized and clearly stated so as to be accessible to young readers.  Text is broken into reasonable chunks, in a large enough font so as not to be intimidating.  Diagrams and illustrations and photos support the text and catch readers’ attention/interest.  The graphics/layout support and attract without distracting.  My one gripe is one I’ve had with a lot of non-fiction books lately:  listing facts horizontally by date and calling it a time-line, even though nothing about the line represents the passage of time (everything is equally spaced, whether the events were separated by a year or three centuries).  All in all a solid choice.