Ahoy, mateys!  A selection of well-loved Mother Goose rhymes have been taken over by pirates!  Black Beard and scallywags stomp and roar about pirates and treasures.  “Yo-ho, pirate! Have ye any gold?  Yes, sir!  Yes, sir!  Three bags told!”  Grab your eye patch and parrot and join in some swashbuckling sea chanteys!

In this adventure of Loula, she overhears her mother say, “I can’t live with that MONSTER anymore!” and Loula immediately assumes she is talking about Loula’s dog, Mister, a Great Dane.  Loula knows Mister is a little too undisciplined most of the time and is determined to change his behavior – and quickly!  She enlists the help of Gilbert, the family chauffeur, and they take Mister through a series of lessons so Mother will allow him to stay.  Villeneuve’s water color and ink illustrations are amusing as they show each attempt and failure of trying to teach Mister some manners.  When they wearily return home, they discover Mother carrying a monstrous Venus Fly Trap out of the house!

I happen to be a big fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson, so I really enjoyed this picture book partial-biography.  I like the end papers covered with quotes from him, and the way more of his quotes are sprinkled throughout the text, describing his joy in building a home of his own and filling it with friends and building his own life to suit his own interests.  I love the theme of overcoming disaster with the help of friends and community.  I wish I could give it a stronger recommendation, but I don’t think the target audience is likely to familiar enough with who Mr. Emerson is to care.  I wish they’d given even a brief introduction at the beginning to tell students about who he was.

It’s fine.  The illustrations are stronger than the story.  The story is about someone who doesn’t fit in with his peers (in this case, an owl who likes poetry — hence the title).  He goes off on his own to enjoy his poetry in secret, but when discovered and teased he runs away, where he finds an audience (of mice) who appreciate his efforts, learning that poetry should be shared, so he doesn’t flee the next time other owls show up, and the more the owls listen, they eventually come to discover they enjoy it too.  It’s fine.  It just seems pretty much like a theme that’s already been done, without anything special to make it stand out.  But the illustrations are cute, and it is a good theme, even if it has been done before.

Wow! Totally cool! I love this book! But then I was not surprised, when I noticed that it’s the same author who created “If the World Were a Village” which is another book that I think is absolutely fabulous.  This book is all about taking really big numbers and illustrating them on a scale that makes them understandable, and those numbers are specific to some big ideas that shape our world and our society (e.g. representing all the wealth in the world as a pile of one hundred coins and the entire population of the world as 100 people to see the distribution; putting 3.5 billion years of life on earth into an hour and listing out when different life forms appear, with modern humans not showing up until 59 mintues and 59.8 seconds have gone by).  It includes a wide range items to draw its comparisons, but they are all things kids can recognize and relate to.  The illustrations support the text and help illustrate the ideas beautifully.  I think every library should have it!

A boy can’t wait for his father to return each summer.  His dad was a great pirate and would tell tales of the crew and their terrific adventures aboard their ship called Hope.  One summer, his father did not return home.  After receiving a telegram, his mother told him they were going to take a trip to see his dad.  They did not end up at the sea as he expected.  They ended up in Belgium.  He learned his father was a miner, not a pirate, and the mine in which he had been working collapsed, killing many.  His father was not dead, but the boy’s faith in his dad, the pirate, did.  When his father returned home to stay, the boy loved him as much as before, but still did not understand why his dad lied.  Later, when a letter arrived saying the mine was closing, the boy’s family returned to Belgium.  The boy noticed, for the first time, his dad’s boarding house was named “Hope”, which shook when the wind blew, like a ship on the seas.  His father had always wanted to be a sailor but could find no jobs on the sea.  When meeting his dad’s old friends, the boy noticed the similarities between them and the “sailors” in his dad’s stories.  Then he knew, his dad was, and always had been, a great pirate.  Imagining life on the seas had saved his dad and his “crew” when they had to find work underground.  An author’s note tells how, after WWII, many Italian workers could only find work as miners in Marcinelle, Belgium.  In 1956, a coal mine fire is remembered as one of Italy’s worst mining catastrophes.  Quarello’s expressive pencil and watercolor illustrations are a great match with this poignant tale of the love and imagination of a young boy’s father.

It’s fine for what it is:  an explanation for young children of how burps happen.  The text is limited, the explanation straight-forward, the full-page color photos and illustrations support the text. I just think these non-fiction books for the younger set tend to give too little information to support the cost of the book.

It’s okay, I guess, but I think a lot of kids would feel cheated by the ending:  the author may be trying to make a point, but the kids who can relate to the character’s struggles aren’t going to buy the believability of the ending.  The story opens with the announcement of the upcoming talent show, and goes through all of Penny’s attempts to try to find a talent she can showcase, and her discouragement.  In the end she goes on-stage to blow her kazoo with her dog, and she gets the award for the “Best Friend.”  School talent shows really do raise such anxieties with a lot of kids, but the reader who might be hoping for an idea to come from all Penny’s searching, are going to scoff that they don’t give out awards for such things (even if some of us think they ought to).

The illustrations are fun.  The general story line is good: about a block where the buildup of Christmas lights and holiday decorations keep growing over the years until it’s completely overwhelming, and in the end the lights go out completely, and they all get a chance to appreciate the beauty of the stars above.  But it’s got some issues:  I realize the ability of astronauts to see the Christmas lights from space, and the tripping of the switch spreading the black-out world-wide are exaggerations for effect, but it didn’t really seem necessary; there are these big bold letters declaring that this book comes with a free song, but when you go to the website to download the link, it’s not so much a song as a reading of the story (presumably by the author), with quiet guitar strumming in the background.  Though the online reader did a fine job of reading it smoothly, I found the flow of the text a bit disjointed, with an inconsistent rhyming pattern.

It tells a little-known bit of American history, the story of one baker’s contribution to the American Revolution.  The illustrations are cool, echoing the title by looking like it’s all made of gingerbread.  The things is, gingerbread has little to do with the story, other than stating up front that in his civilian life the baker was known for his gingerbread.  His contribution to the war effort was actually in baking regular bread.