This is a wonderfully inspiring picture-book biography about following one’s dreams.  Born in the midst of the great depression in the to a family of southern farm workers, Benny dreamed of moving out into the wider world, but in the meantime he used his art to capture the daily world around him.  Knowing finishing high school would be an important part of escaping his current circumstances, Benny he remained dedicated to his education.  Military service after high school first gave him an opportunity to travel, and then allowed him to continue his college education, and throughout he continued to use his art to capture daily life, and given the times in which he lived, it became a force in the civil rights movement.

As early-reader non-fiction goes, this one does a pretty decent job of providing a reasonable amount of information while keeping the readability easy.  Like other Pebble Plus non-fiction, this one offers 3-4 sentences per page, opposite full-page color illustrations.  This one accurately recognizes pirate treasure as stolen goods, not romanticizing the pirates, but acknowledging the lure it has held for many over the years.  The illustrations are partially historical artwork of the time, and partly color photos of historical recreations.

It’s a sweet story, in a somewhat vintage sort of way.  It tells the story of the family of an impoverished artist.  Having fallen out with his wealthy uncle who wanted him to go into business, the young artist and his family struggle to get by, his small children helping out the local book shop owner in exchange for being allowed to sit and read his inventory.  Just when their father is about to finish his masterpiece, and has a buyer all lined up for it if he can finish by the next day, he runs out of red paint, and the local art dealer won’t extend him any more credit.  Wanting to help, but coming up short, the children sit in the book shop bemoaning their family’s troubles, little knowing they are being overheard by another gentleman in the shop, who just happens to be the long-estranged wealthy uncle, who has had a change of heart, so the needed red paint shows up as the gift of an anonymous benefactor just in time.  The problem is that this is a reprint of a book originally published before color illustrations were common, and I doubt many children today will appreciate the sketchy brown-tone illustrations.

It’s cute.  It’s a series of poems centered around the theme of student down-time, hobbies, homework, and friendships — all topics students will relate to.  The illustrations are cute and cartoonish and inviting.  It offers a fun, non-threatening way to share poetry with children.

Not one of my favorites.  The pictures are bright and cheerful, and kids who are familiar with other Hot Rod Hamster books may enjoy it, but it’s one of those books that seems to sacrifice story for the sake of keeping the vocabulary and format in the target range for early readers: the result is that the story is a bit flat.  It tells of a day at a water park for Hot Rod Hamster and his friends, getting ice pops, choosing floaties, racing on the water slides. There just doesn’t seem to be any climax or purpose.

A really fabulous book that offers a sampling of the wide variety of backgrounds and circumstances lived by those in the United States who call themselves Latino or Latina. Each of the dozen chapters begins with a first-person (fictional) vignette, written in a free-verse form, sharing one individual’s story, followed by several pages of non-fiction information about one branch of the Latino community, which sets that vignette in context.  Through this book, the reader gains insights into the similarities and differences of the experiences of families whose roots are Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Sephardic, Zapotec, Peruvian, and mixed; who are documented and undocumented; who are first-generation immigrants or who have been here for many generations; pursuing many different careers and dreams and facing different challenges. The pairing of the fictional vignettes with the non-fiction passages allows each to enrich the other, and the voice throughout is one of respect and authenticity.

A beautifully told picture-book biography about a little known bit of sports history.  Even though an all-woman’s baseball league may not have come to be until WWII, when all the men were overseas, but all-women professional teams go back at least until the 1920s.  This book tells the story of Baseball Hall-of-Famer Edith Houghton who joined the Philadelphia Bobbies (an all-female team, so named because all the players bobbed their hair), as starting short-stop at the age of 10.  In 1925, at the age of 13, when most people she knew had never been outside of Philadelphia, Edith traveled with the Bobbies to Japan and spent two months traveling from town to town playing against men’s teams.  The text is rich in details that really tell the tale, and the water-color illustrations do a fabulous job of setting the scene and capturing the mood of the era. It is a wonderfully inspiring bit of history.

Densely packed with a lot of really complex ideas, yet written in a manner that makes that information accessible and non-threatening.  The illustrations a cartoonish, in the style common to the rest of this series, and they offer support for the text, which is itself very readable and clear.  It is guilty of one of my major pet peeves — a “timeline” on the initial end pages that fails to represent the passage of time properly, spacing all the dates equally, regardless of the amount of time between them — but given the quality of the rest of the book, I’m willing to forgive this fault.

A fabulous read!  This collective biography introduces readers to twenty famous scientists who shaped the history of human understanding.  The collection does a good job of drawing from a variety of cultures and scientific disciplines, going as far back as China in the early years of the Common Era.  It includes the famous names students are likely to have heard of (but may or may not know much about), such as Galileo and Newton and Einstein, as well as many that were new to me (e.g. Zhang Heng, Ibn Sina, William and Caroline Herschel).  For each scientist, the book provides the basics of the significance of their discoveries, but the main focus of the book is adding personality to the names, to get the sense of what kind of person each was, giving context to their lives and their work.  It’s very readable and interesting.  Elementary librarians should be aware that some parents may complain as their are a few references to some of these great names having extra-marital affairs, but such references are brief.

What librarian is not going to recommend a book where the characters from books come to life through the power of imagination to rescue the little local book shop from destruction. Little Joey is on his rounds delivering newspapers around London when he learns of the book shop owner’s distress that there are plans in the works to knock down his shop to make way for a super store.  Little Joey immediately whispers into his news bag and Origami Girl bursts forth to help.  Needing help, she heads into the book shop, tapping assorted children’s favorites until an army of favorite book characters has burst forth, but when they find the leaders of Parliament snoozing, and the Mayor and the workers about ready to break ground, they know they’ll need even more reinforcements, so they head to the library.  When the Mayor shouts at his workers to destroy them because they’re only made of paper, they respond my shouting back that they are made of ideas and imagination, things that can never be destroyed, and since the workers’ children have followed the characters to the work site, they’re not about to battle the stuff of their dreams before their very eyes, so the Mayor knows he’s beat, and the book shop is saved.  The illustrations provide a great opportunity for young readers to see which favorite characters they recognize, and to start a discussion about their own favorites. It’s a winner.