On the one hand, I can sometimes be a bit reluctant to spend a lot of money on non-fiction for emergent readers, because they can be a bit weak on information. But those early readers need non-fiction, too, and this one earns a lot of points on the cute factor. How can baby hippopotamuses be so ugly and so cute at the same time? With only one or two sentences per two-page spread, the information is indeed limited, but it still manages to cover all the basics, and the beautiful, full-color photos do a great job of supporting the text for beginning readers. My level of Spanish probably puts me on a par with emergent readers in this instance, and I was able to work my way through with a fairly solid level of understanding. And it’s got a good, sturdy binding, too.

This is a beautiful book! The illustrations are bright and celebratory. The story celebrates diversity, while recognizing that many children face challenges that make them feel different from their peer. As a group of children work together to plant a garden, each one in turns shares a personal story of challenge (diabetes, autism, asthma, allergies, wheelchairs, blindness, deafness), yet the questions that transition from one child to the next also serve as a link connecting them in their diversity. In the end, the parallel is explicitly pointed out that the garden they’ve built is full of a variety of different kinds of plants, and how boring would it be if it was all the same.

It’s a dual-language book, sharing the story in both English and Spanish. It tells about a young girl attending a Bomba dance class that she’s not real excited about at first. She’s anxious and highly self-critical. She stands behind the best dancer in the class, ostensibly so she can watch her and follow her lead, but really she just compares herself to the older girl. When she hears she’s going to be invited to perform a solo in front of her classmates, she’s so riddled with anxiety that she is not able to pay attention to those performing before her. When she actually gets started she focuses on the rhythm of the drum and gets lost in the drum and does great. It’s an okay story. I just thought it was a bit disjointed, without clear connections drawn as to what led to her change of attitude.

It’s a cautionary tale, a reminder of human messes. It doesn’t focus on how oil is made or what it is used for. It tells how it is pumped from beneath the earth and sent through a pipeline that runs 800 miles through what was once wilderness. It tells how it is pumped onto enormous ships, and how one night the Exxon Valez ran aground and spilled its cargo of oil into the ocean, where it spread for months over thousands of miles of ocean, killing sea birds and otters, and coating shorelines. It tells that thirty years later the place where it happened has never fully recovered.

It’s a good discussion starter book around numbers and observation. A concept book about counting, it doesn’t come right out and tell the reader what is to be counted. Photos of familiar objects are presented, each of which offer several compositional elements that could be counted, leaving it up to the observer to share what they see. Sets of pictures with similar components open up discussion for the concepts of same v. different and change as well.

Well, I’m only familiar with three of the twenty-six artists discussed in this book, and I guess the main problem is that I still don’t feel very familiar with the other twenty-three. For each artists, a brief paragraph (three or four sentences) tells a bit about their preferred medium and/or themes, but the art in the book is dominated by the artistic style of the illustrator, rather than highlighting the actual art of the artists being discussed.

I want to like it more than I do. The illustrations are cute. It tells the story of a snail who’s convinced by his friend that it’s time to start looking for a new home, and expand his world beyond the bucket of strawberries where he’s been spending all his time. As they head out on their search, Snail spots the apple orchard right away, and is drawn to the bright red fruit, but Ladybug warns him about the danger of the chicken coop that lies between. While Ladybug is intent on wanting to show him a whole list of places, Snail continues to be drawn by the apple orchard, and sets off on his own, nearly falling into the clutches of the chicken. It’s fine. It just didn’t have anything about it that really grabbed me.

To be honest, it’s not my favorite of the Jack books. When I heard the author speak about the Jack books, he shared that it’s a very deliberate choice to avoid having his books fit the moralistic tale model that so many children’s books follow, and I appreciate that Jack is in general a bit of a trickster character who is less that perfect. That’s what makes him likable. But in this one he catches the bank robber in the act, and then turns around and steals one of the bags of loot himself. I thought that went a little too far.