I didn’t find it particularly well-written.  There was a lot of repetitiveness. The use of bullets was forced, like they just wanted credit for including non-fiction text features.  It does include a lot of time-period photos, but not nearly enough to support the text on a topic is inherently a visual one and which may be very unfamiliar to many readers (e.g. on the page describing women’s hats, the text describes five different kinds of hats, but only one is pictured).

I know all these picture search books are popular with my students, and I’ve seen a variety of them before, but this being the first time I’ve reviewed one, it’s the first time I’ve examined one this closely.  Besides the rich details within each photo, I was delighted to notice the way the sequence of photos throughout the book told a story without words, from the time the train set is carved, painted, sold, unwrapped, enjoyed, abandoned, yard-saled, refurbished, and enjoyed again.

A beautiful, imaginative poem inviting the reader to share in the joys of swinging on an autumn day.  The words and illustrations work together to create a lyrical delight.  A great introduction to poetical expression.

Ugh.  This book is trying to use a shiny cover and bright graphics to pretend it has something to say.  With only a sentence or two per page, it speaks in very broad generalities, often being presumptuous about describing schools today in ways that aren’t necessarily true about all schools, and much of what they state about schools in the past still applies at many schools today.  The only thing this book is really good for is as the example to use when teaching students to be critical readers recognizing over-generalized statements.

Light on information: relatively vague statements about what some believe versus what others say.  When reviewing another book in this series, I blamed the lack of substance on what happens when trying to write about “the unexplained.” But I recently read another book about Atlantis that had a lot more specific information to offer, describing in detail how and where the myth has developed across time.  I’m not sure whether the trade of substance for ease of reading is a worthwhile one — I suppose they each fit a different niche in the library, but if I had to choose just one, this wouldn’t be the one.

An odd little story:  a kid’s in a store where he’s not supposed to touch anything, so he pretends to be a silkworm, crawling around on the floor to pretend he’s in a cocoon; and then he accidentally breaks a bunch of figurines, getting a bump on his head in the process; he gets in trouble for breaking the stuff because no one believes that he didn’t touch them, an no one pays attention to his bump; later that night he overhears his mom break a vase after he’s supposed to be in bead, and his dad tells her not to worry because it could happen to anyone; then the kid dreams that the figurines all tell him, “It could happen to anyone,” and put ice on his bump.  It seems like the stories this publisher puts out are all trying very hard to make a point, but they never really seem to hit the mark, or to make the reader care.  Maybe they’re losing something in translation, as I believe they were all originally published in other languages.

Rather than a re-telling of the original nursery rhyme, this delightfully illustrated adaptation uses variations on the first line to create a new rhyme describing different animals playing different instruments.  A great addition to support the music curriculum, as well as useful in teaching rhyme and verbs.  And just plain fun.

The illustrations are nice, but the story line is really intended for preschool audiences.  There’s not really enough of a plot to capture the attention of school-aged kids.  It basically tells of the little toy train taking the other toys to their chosen destinations around the house, including sound effects like chug chug and quack quack.

The design of the book makes it very definitely a book with an elementary school target audience, but most of the photos used to illustrate the text show teenagers, and the text itself is presumptuous, first and foremost about assuming that the readers’ school offers dance groups I’ve usually only seen at the secondary level, and then too about assuming how those groups will conduct themselves (what to expect at tryouts, etc), yet not all school groups (when they do exist) operate the same way. All in all, a rather ill-conceived book.

It’s your basic what-it’s-like-when-parents-divorvce book: a small girl describing how things used to be different, but when mom and dad started fighting they decided they needed two homes, and she lives in both, and sometimes she misses the parent she’s not with, but she can always talk to them on the phone, etc. Every library needs to have something like this, and if you need one, this is a good one — very matter-of-fact and nicely illustrated — but I don’t know that it’s any better than others along the same line if you’ve already got one.