A sweet story about doing things your own way.  When Bear finds he has out-grown his little boat, he gives it away and sets to building himself a new one.  He tells his mother he knows just what he wants, builds it himself, and tells the boat when he is finished, “You are just what I dreamed you would be.”  But as he gets ready to put it in the water, several other animals come by telling him what his boat needs, and he takes all their suggestions, until he is completely disgusted with how it turned out.  Not wanting to hurt his friends’ feelings, he assured them that he knew they were trying to help and that he appreciated their good intentions but, “A bear should never let go of his own dream.”  The illustrations are cute, and support the text, and the animals faces give them personality.

It basically tells the life story of a blanket & bear, from the time they were given to a newborn, to how he took them with him everywhere until they got left behind one day; on their journey to try to find him again they visit an island of retired blankets and bears enjoying their free time, and they are invited to stay, but they continue their search for the young boy who needs them; eventually they find him, only to discover that he is all grown up and no longer needs them, so they return the the island to retire in leisure.  The story is told in rhyme, and the illustrations are soft and sentimental (but the eyes on the people are a little creepy).  There’s just not any kind of climax or compelling hook to make us care about the blanket and bear.  It’s okay, but not exceptional.

The pair that created the fabulous A Leaf Can Be… have teamed up and done it again.  This simple, poetical book helps readers consider water in all its many forms and capacities.  Most pages contain only a couple words, with opposite pages sharing rhyming pairs describing water in different forms: “garden soaker” (rain) opposite “valley cloaker” (fog).  The illustrations are beautiful and whimsical and support the text, so that readers must often consult the illustration to make meaning from the text. In the back of the book more detailed text offers explanations for each of the names given to water throughout the book, and a glossary and suggestions for further reading are also included.  It really is a delightful book!

This book is beautiful!  If your library was only going to have one version of Beauty and the Beast, I would recommend this one.  The re-telling stays true to the most traditional versions of the story, and is perhaps too long for the youngest audiences, but it is the amazing illustrations that make this such a fabulous choice:  they mix the use of silhouette and color to stunning effect, and include enough delicate detail to evoke the era/locale of the story.  Highly, highly recommended!!

It’s a cute little story, following your basic story line of pampered princess who wants to know what peasant life is like, combined with the ever-popular princess-who-is-going-to-be-forced-to-marry-someone-she-doesn’t-like.  What makes this one different is the silly extremity of the characters that makes it rather cartoon-like:  the potential suitors consist of a man so ugly his servants are charged with making sure he never sees a reflective surface, a man so vain he must always have a mirror within sight, and conjoined twins who love potty humor and fighting.  It wasn’t what I was expecting from Lois Lowry — I was hoping for something with characters of more depth.

Nothing about it is really grabbing me, but I guess I don’t really have any strong objections either, so it lands in the fuzzy “additional purchase” category.  It’s a series of very short poems (most of which follow pretty much the same five-short-line format) that together trace through the course of a day from getting up and getting dressed to playing at the park, eating dinner, and going to bed.  My only actual gripe is with the color-scheme of the illustrations that seems to be part of a trend I’ve been noticing lately in too many picture books: using colors that are rather soft and dull and kinda drab.

Horses continuously provide a certain lure to certain readers.  Wild horses have a special allure all their own.  The beautiful color photos that illustrate this book will hook the readers, and the text will inform them and make them think.  As it traces the story (across several decades) of the research that has gone into developing a medicine to control the population growth of wild horses with minimal intrusion, and why such measures are necessary, it also teaches about the history of wild horses, their genetics, and their lifestyle (although somehow that doesn’t seem like the appropriate word to apply to a community of animals, but I like how all-encompasing it is).  It is well-written and packed with science in a real-world context.

The illustrations are cute, but the story is lame.  It’s basically about a chameleon who’s all excited to see a sign declaring him “King of the Zoo,” until he tours the zoo, seeing the same sign on all the animals and throwing a temper tantrum over not being the best, until he’s all happy again when one little visitor declares him to be her favorite.  We never have an explanation for what the purpose is of the signs, and the chameleon never learns that it’s not a competition.  There doesn’t seem to be a point other than to provide an excuse to draw a cute chameleon shifting shapes/colors.

It’s a fun little story about being proud of your differences.  Crispin is a young dragon who is at first horrified on his seventh birthday, when he’s supposed to start breathing  fire, to find that he breathes other stuff instead.  First his dad tries taking him to the doctor or school to solve the problem, then Crispin runs away to try to escape the problem, and then he befriends a young knight who tries to help him solve the problem, but in the end everyone realizes that being different isn’t necessarily a problem after all.  It helps that every time Crispin tries to breathe fire, whatever comes out instead happens to be whatever is most useful at that moment.  Dragons are always a hit, and this one is cute and conveying a good message.

I like the style of the artwork:  the colors are rich, the monsters are silly — they’re eye-catching.  I’m not sure if it’s a failing in the artwork or in the storyline, or in the connection between the two, but somewhere there is a lack.  This is a nearly wordless story (tag, you’re, & it are the only words), and as such it is dependent upon the strength of the pictures to tell the story.  Maybe it’s a matter of the story being too complicated to be well told in this format, but all the way through you’re never really sure what’s going on, or what the point is — it leaves too many questions unanswered in my opinion, but then maybe it’s going for that — leaving it to the reader’s interpretation?