Nothing about it is really grabbing me, but I guess I don’t really have any strong objections either, so it lands in the fuzzy “additional purchase” category.  It’s a series of very short poems (most of which follow pretty much the same five-short-line format) that together trace through the course of a day from getting up and getting dressed to playing at the park, eating dinner, and going to bed.  My only actual gripe is with the color-scheme of the illustrations that seems to be part of a trend I’ve been noticing lately in too many picture books: using colors that are rather soft and dull and kinda drab.

Horses continuously provide a certain lure to certain readers.  Wild horses have a special allure all their own.  The beautiful color photos that illustrate this book will hook the readers, and the text will inform them and make them think.  As it traces the story (across several decades) of the research that has gone into developing a medicine to control the population growth of wild horses with minimal intrusion, and why such measures are necessary, it also teaches about the history of wild horses, their genetics, and their lifestyle (although somehow that doesn’t seem like the appropriate word to apply to a community of animals, but I like how all-encompasing it is).  It is well-written and packed with science in a real-world context.

The illustrations are cute, but the story is lame.  It’s basically about a chameleon who’s all excited to see a sign declaring him “King of the Zoo,” until he tours the zoo, seeing the same sign on all the animals and throwing a temper tantrum over not being the best, until he’s all happy again when one little visitor declares him to be her favorite.  We never have an explanation for what the purpose is of the signs, and the chameleon never learns that it’s not a competition.  There doesn’t seem to be a point other than to provide an excuse to draw a cute chameleon shifting shapes/colors.

It’s a fun little story about being proud of your differences.  Crispin is a young dragon who is at first horrified on his seventh birthday, when he’s supposed to start breathing  fire, to find that he breathes other stuff instead.  First his dad tries taking him to the doctor or school to solve the problem, then Crispin runs away to try to escape the problem, and then he befriends a young knight who tries to help him solve the problem, but in the end everyone realizes that being different isn’t necessarily a problem after all.  It helps that every time Crispin tries to breathe fire, whatever comes out instead happens to be whatever is most useful at that moment.  Dragons are always a hit, and this one is cute and conveying a good message.

I like the style of the artwork:  the colors are rich, the monsters are silly — they’re eye-catching.  I’m not sure if it’s a failing in the artwork or in the storyline, or in the connection between the two, but somewhere there is a lack.  This is a nearly wordless story (tag, you’re, & it are the only words), and as such it is dependent upon the strength of the pictures to tell the story.  Maybe it’s a matter of the story being too complicated to be well told in this format, but all the way through you’re never really sure what’s going on, or what the point is — it leaves too many questions unanswered in my opinion, but then maybe it’s going for that — leaving it to the reader’s interpretation?

The illustrations are absolutely charming!  I just wish the story lived up to the illustrations.  Mostly it’s about a bunch of sibling mice getting into one scrape and another before and after their sister’s wedding, and their mom being none too pleased about it.  It reads like a list of this one did that and that one did this, and it never seems to really lead anywhere or build to any kind of climax.

Somehow when I read this book, I picture Guido putting his kids to bed, and them begging Daddy to tell them a story, and this was what he came up with.  It’s just kinda silly and fun:  all around the world a bunch of large animals are in trouble of one kind and another, and somehow Super Ladybug finds out and comes to everyone’s rescue, with just the right tool for the job (except I personally think his “wonderful water tank” looked too small to do a decent job of refilling the camel’s humps).  Some kids will think it’s just the silliest thing. Who need why or how?

I think I need to stop selecting books by this publisher:  I seem to always find them a bit odd.  The illustrations in this one are beautiful, and perhaps the youngest readers will be content to look at the pictures and make up their own stories, but I doubt many of my students will enjoy the story.  I don’t know whether it’s because the story was originally written in another language, and something was lost in translation, or if it is a matter of cross-cultural disconnect in the accustomed manner of story-telling, but I found it long and rambling without much of a story arc to follow.

I love the bright, vivid, folk-art illustrations, but the story falls flat.  It basically takes a whole lot of words to tell the reader that this guy had a bunch of troublesome goats that his wives wanted him to get rid of, but his kids wanted him to keep, and he took them to market to sell them, but kids kept whining, moms gave in, and when he returned he ended up with even more goats.  It tells us he was surprised to discover the extra goats, without ever telling us where they came from, and there’s not enough plot or character development for the reader to care about the goats.  Too many words to not really tell us much.

Though fans will enjoy the familiar character, and the story is definitely a common problem faced in expanding families (when the little princess is told about a pending addition to the family, she insists she only wants a sister, no matter how many times she is reminded it may turn out to be a brother), I personally find the little princess to be a bit annoying.  It’s fine, and if you need another new-baby-on-the-way book, it might fill a useful niche, but how many of those does a library really need?