A nice rhyming little jingle urging vegetable consumption.  It lists several kinds, reminds us of the valuable vitamins they contain, and declares that tomatoes are indeed veggies not fruits.  It defines a vegetable as a plant grown as food, but the designates those grown on trees as fruit. But are all fruits grown on trees? Not berries. But I don’t think strawberries count as a vegetable. Hm…  I was hoping for a little more discussion as to the characteristics defining the different food groups. It’s cute for what it is, but it’s not a necessary purchase.

I listed it as a K-5 book, but I could see it having its uses among older students as well.  It is a Jewish folktale about a ruler who dresses as a servant to go see if the people of his land are happy.  After enjoying the hospitality of poor man who is very happy and generous despite his poverty, the ruler decides to test the faith of this man:  he keeps making declarations that put an end to the man’s ability to earn his evening meal, but the man keeps finding a new line of work.  When he makes him a soldier, who will not receive his pay until the end of the month, the man sells his silver sword for money to tide him over, and carves a wooden one to carry in his scabbard.  When the man is asked to execute a thief he prays aloud in he square that if the thief deserves his fate that his sword be sharp, but if the thief deserves mercy that his sword turn to wood, and so the thief is spared, the ruler is impressed with the man’s steadfastness and wisdom, and rewards him with a position as a royal advisor. In the end, everything worked out as it should.

Okay, I said it’s for grades K-2, but really it’s also for anyone who loves a dog. It’s a poem with a young girl declaring all the ways and reasons she loves her dog.  The water-color illustrations are just sweet.  It makes you go, “ahh…” And I’m a cat person.

It appears to be a children’s picture book, telling the tale of Noah’s brother Neil, who saved all the vegetables from the Great Flood while his brother saved the animals.  The thing is, I’m not sure if children really are its target audience, or if it’s really intended for adults.  In sketching the characters of the two brothers, Noah is described as an ambitious business man (the illustration of the animals getting loaded onto the ark two-by-two shows them drawn with butchers’ markings showing the different cuts of beef).  In contrast, Neil, the hero of the tale is described as a poor hippy who “wore his hair long and chatted dreamily to pot plants.”  Much as I hate to be put into the role of book censor, I’m not sure I can put this in my elementary school library, where we’re trying to convince children that drugs are a bad idea.  Can it go in a high school library? Is the public library the better place for it? I’m not assigning an grade level to it, because I’m not sure who to put.

It’s got a lot of good information, but I’m not sure I like the cartoon illustrations and the literary device of setting the information within a context of imagining you are actually traveling to Uranus.  Rather than enhancing the information, they seem to baby it down — I’m afraid older elementary students will turn up their noses at it.

When a young vampire first gets his grown-up fangs he’s anxious to bite something, and runs all around the neighborhood driving everyone batty until he meets the new kids who’ve moved into the neighborhood.  When the boy he’s trying to make friends with is complaining about his little sister’s habit of biting, Moony goes along with declaring biting to be baby stuff, as he’s more interested in making a friend than in biting.  It’s full of vampiric plays-on-words.  Both story and illustrations are a bit on the bland side.

Essentially a wordless story, using a graphic novel, it tells the tale of a magician’s rabbit, and the mischief he gets into after the magician has gone home for the day, tormenting the dog, spilling milk, and generally creating havoc as he tries to get the carrots out of the magician’s kitchen.  Like other wordless books, it can serve as a useful writing or story telling prompt.

There will be plenty who will raise objections to the assuredness with with which the author speaks of a theory many still consider controversial.  The  first page of the foreward declares, “that theory has given us the correct explanation of our origins.”  My own objection that keeps it from getting a full-fledge recommendation has to do with the density of material: it is attempting to be a book for young people, but even I found it challenging at time.  It will be a good tool for students who already have a strong interest in the topic and the perseverance to wade through it.

It really does a pretty good job of taking some pretty complex concepts and making them comprehensible to kids.  It doesn’t brush over things or speak in too-broad generalities, but it uses kid language and examples to illustrate big ideas about how our universe works.  It also includes historical background on how our human understanding of gravity has changed over time.  A good selection of photos gives it visual appeal.

In keeping with the general style of the rest of this series, the book sets the stage to put the reader into the past, breaks information into small bits scattered around the pages that are illustrated in an engaging cartoon-like manner.  This volume does a good job of comprehensively explaining the short-lived history of the Pony Express, sharing who got it started and why, how it worked, and why it came to an end.  I’m just not sure how well it lives up to its title, as I can imagine many students reading it and thinking it sounds like a grand adventure they would’ve loved to be part of.