I’m sorry.  I’m just not a fan. The same publisher puts out a similar series of early chapter books based on classic super heroes, of which I really am a fan.  But this pet spin-off seems pointless.  The characters are a speedy turtle who is meant to be the pet of The Flash, and two newts who want to be pets to the villain Professor Zoom.  After hiding in Zoom’s bag, the newts find their way into his laboratory and start mucking around with his giant robot, but they’re in over their heads and set it loose on the city without really having it under control.  Speedy comes to the rescue by causing the robot to crash into some electrical lines and fry itself.  I found the characters undeveloped and the story line a bit lame.  Maybe I’m a purist, but there didn’t really seem to be a point to the whole pet angle.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a necessary addition to every collection, but if you’ve got students who exhibit particular interest in the Presidents of the United States, this could be a nice addition.  As one might expect there is certainly more known about the mothers of some presidents than there is of others, but taken together, these snippets  offer an interesting glimpse into the varied backgrounds of the men who became President.  One of the sad things this book brings home is how many mothers didn’t live long enough to know that their sons had became president.  The illustrations are rather cartoonish, adding a bit of levity, while helping to make clear the different personalities of the women who raised presidents.

The illustrations are the real lure of the book — they’re charming!  The story basically tells of the day in the life of an octopus, as he uses his powers of camouflage and ink sprays to escape some annoying seahorses and seek some solitude.  It tells of her encounters with jelly fish and crabs and a whale and clownfish on her quest for peace and quiet.  When she finally finds herself in a quiet place, she finds herself missing the bustle of the reef and returns home.

This is the fourth book Wendy Mass has set in the small, unusual town of Willow Falls, and the title seems to imply it is the final book in the series.  As such, it does a really nice job of wrapping together the other books, and explaining the mysterious character that linked her other books.  While bringing satisfactory closure to this delightful series, it also manages to set up the possibility of a companion series to follow.  It brings back well-loved characters and ties together mystery and humor and time-travel as Amanda and Leo (the main characters from the first book in the series, 11 Birthdays) work together to unravel and rescue Grace, who has fallen into a strange trance.

The drawings are cute, but the colors are a bit drab.  The story is similarly drab: it tells of a Mama elephant (whose child is a chicken), who puts on a silly hat, goes to the market, buys some stuff, fixes a flat tire on the way home, and enjoys her purchases.  There’s not much in the way of character development or anything to make the reader care about the plot.  I’m not sure what the point of the story is.

A beautiful book of poems, all inspired by things one might see on a walk through some back-yard woods.  The poems illustrate a variety of poetic forms.  The illustrations are charming and set the poems off well.  A nice tool to inspire young poets to see what inspiration they may find in their own back yards.

The illustrations are bright and vibrant and beautiful.  The words are full of rhyme and rhythm and repetition.  It’s a counting book, counting both up and down as the polliwogs plopping in the soggy bog turn into grimpy-grumpy frogs siting on the mossy log.  It’s got a variety of adjectives.  All-around, it’s a fun book for very young readers, which somewhat reminds me of Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom, for its use of sounds and playing with words.

It’s a very attractive book, with a shiny cover and a sturdy binding and lots of visuals.  I also like that vocabulary words are bolded and defined in the margins, right on the page where they are found.  Unfortunately, I found the text a bit surface-level, with a lot of generalities, and sometimes statements that even seemed contradictory: in the introduction it starts out by telling us how stable the Egyptian government was for 3000 years, and then in the first chapter it goes on to list a litany of wars and changes of dynasties, interspersed with periods of chaos and civil unrest; on page 68 it tells us, “Royalty, the wealthy, and children were the only people with leisure time,” but a few pages later it states that, “Board games were a popular way for both the poor and the wealthy to enjoy family time.”  More than once the book tells us that for a long time experts in Egyptology believed one thing, but that now they believe something else, but the reader is never told what the evidence was that altered long-held understandings. Also, the “timeline” in the back of the book simply lists a series of dates horizontally, evenly spaced, even though some of the time periods cover 2000 years, and others only 300 years — there’s nothing in the spacing to provide a visual representation of the time involved.

I found this series to be very attractive, beautifully designed, but somewhat weak on substance.  The binding is sturdy, the cover is shiny, the text is interspersed with attractive photos and illustrations, and vocabulary words are defined in the margins.  All of these are nice features.  But I thought the information was somewhat lacking in depth.  Right away in the first chapter it tells us that modern historians must rely on archaeology and the written accounts of Spanish invaders and native Incas who were educated by those invaders after the 1500s, because the Inca people left no written records. The author even uses the words “cloaked in mystery” to describe the early history, but then the text goes on to assert as fact many details from ancient times without ever backing up for the reader how we know what we think we know.  I would have liked to have seen more frequently phrases such as, “[such and such] evidence indicates…”  Also, the designers of the book are guilty of one of my current pet-pieves for non-fiction text features:  a “timeline” that is really just a sequence of events written horizontally, where dates are evenly spaced without regard to how much time separated them:  two inches in one place represents 500 years, and in another place along the same line, the same two inches represents only 25 years.  In elementary school, I was taught that the distance along a timeline was supposed to be a visual representation of actual time.

This book was surprisingly readable.  I confess that I put off reading it for a long time, because I didn’t expect it to be interesting, but once I started it, I read it rather quickly. It basically tells the story of how the U.S. Constitution came to be written, including the problems with the Articles of Confederation, the people who gathered to improve upon it, and the many arguments and compromises that went into its creation.  Appendices in the back include the text of the Preamble and the Bill of Rights.  I was rather surprised that it did not include the text of the Constitution itself — that would have made it easier to reference when various articles were discussed.