This book has fun pictures but the story line seems to have no real conclusions.  Maybe for kids who like to imagine their own solutions, this could be an interesting book, to me, it just seamed to ramble around.

The drawings are cute, but the colors are a bit drab.  The story is similarly drab: it tells of a Mama elephant (whose child is a chicken), who puts on a silly hat, goes to the market, buys some stuff, fixes a flat tire on the way home, and enjoys her purchases.  There’s not much in the way of character development or anything to make the reader care about the plot.  I’m not sure what the point of the story is.

A beautiful book of poems, all inspired by things one might see on a walk through some back-yard woods.  The poems illustrate a variety of poetic forms.  The illustrations are charming and set the poems off well.  A nice tool to inspire young poets to see what inspiration they may find in their own back yards.

The illustrations are bright and vibrant and beautiful.  The words are full of rhyme and rhythm and repetition.  It’s a counting book, counting both up and down as the polliwogs plopping in the soggy bog turn into grimpy-grumpy frogs siting on the mossy log.  It’s got a variety of adjectives.  All-around, it’s a fun book for very young readers, which somewhat reminds me of Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom, for its use of sounds and playing with words.

It’s a very attractive book, with a shiny cover and a sturdy binding and lots of visuals.  I also like that vocabulary words are bolded and defined in the margins, right on the page where they are found.  Unfortunately, I found the text a bit surface-level, with a lot of generalities, and sometimes statements that even seemed contradictory: in the introduction it starts out by telling us how stable the Egyptian government was for 3000 years, and then in the first chapter it goes on to list a litany of wars and changes of dynasties, interspersed with periods of chaos and civil unrest; on page 68 it tells us, “Royalty, the wealthy, and children were the only people with leisure time,” but a few pages later it states that, “Board games were a popular way for both the poor and the wealthy to enjoy family time.”  More than once the book tells us that for a long time experts in Egyptology believed one thing, but that now they believe something else, but the reader is never told what the evidence was that altered long-held understandings. Also, the “timeline” in the back of the book simply lists a series of dates horizontally, evenly spaced, even though some of the time periods cover 2000 years, and others only 300 years — there’s nothing in the spacing to provide a visual representation of the time involved.

I found this series to be very attractive, beautifully designed, but somewhat weak on substance.  The binding is sturdy, the cover is shiny, the text is interspersed with attractive photos and illustrations, and vocabulary words are defined in the margins.  All of these are nice features.  But I thought the information was somewhat lacking in depth.  Right away in the first chapter it tells us that modern historians must rely on archaeology and the written accounts of Spanish invaders and native Incas who were educated by those invaders after the 1500s, because the Inca people left no written records. The author even uses the words “cloaked in mystery” to describe the early history, but then the text goes on to assert as fact many details from ancient times without ever backing up for the reader how we know what we think we know.  I would have liked to have seen more frequently phrases such as, “[such and such] evidence indicates…”  Also, the designers of the book are guilty of one of my current pet-pieves for non-fiction text features:  a “timeline” that is really just a sequence of events written horizontally, where dates are evenly spaced without regard to how much time separated them:  two inches in one place represents 500 years, and in another place along the same line, the same two inches represents only 25 years.  In elementary school, I was taught that the distance along a timeline was supposed to be a visual representation of actual time.

This book was surprisingly readable.  I confess that I put off reading it for a long time, because I didn’t expect it to be interesting, but once I started it, I read it rather quickly. It basically tells the story of how the U.S. Constitution came to be written, including the problems with the Articles of Confederation, the people who gathered to improve upon it, and the many arguments and compromises that went into its creation.  Appendices in the back include the text of the Preamble and the Bill of Rights.  I was rather surprised that it did not include the text of the Constitution itself — that would have made it easier to reference when various articles were discussed.

There was no department of children’s services in the middle ages.  After being threatened by the innkeeper his dad sold him to for beer, Will Sparrow runs off and must make his own way in the world any which way he can.  He meets (and often finds himself cheated by) many interesting characters along the way, as he fills his belly by foraging, thieving, and teaming up with assorted hucksters at market fairs.  I love Karen Cushman’s books in general, and I would count this one among her better ones: there’s something about rooting for a kid on his own, wondering what it would be like to find yourself in such a situation, that works as a great way to draw young readers into the genre of historical fiction.  The depictions of the setting will draw students in and help them imagine a time period far-removed, about which they may know little.  I’m a fan.

Flutter is a powerful story about sisterhood, survival, and love that I’m sure will stay with you for a long time!  As Mama prepares to have her baby, sisters Dawn, Maple, and Beetle all prepare to welcome baby sister Lily.  The story is told by middle sister Maple .  When Baby Lily arrives too early and with a heart that does not work quite right, Maple knows it’s up to her to find a miracle that will save Baby Lily.  In searching for “the miracle” sisters Dawn and Maple encounter real dangers and realize a thing or two about miracles..and about each other.  There is plenty of adventure in this book to hold the interest and attention of any reader.

With kids growing up watching more reality TV than other programming, it’s no wonder The Daughters series would be picked up by a publisher.  And with a name like Philbin attached to it, Poppy took a chance.  Does is matter that teens probably don’t know who Regis Philbin is?  A little, because as one reads The Daughters Break the Rules, Carina, who narrates this second installment of the series, finds is frustrating to be known as “the daughter of a billionaire” because of the assumptions that are constantly made.  But Philbin is realistic in her portrayal of these three teen starlet children living in NYC.  While Carina is at first crushed when her father cuts her off from her lavish spending habits, a reader can clearly see that she’ll rebound.  She can make it on $20 a week.  But I really like the fact that Carina is allowed to become part old self and part new self by the end.  Her vision of the world is much more broad, thanks to a love interest from a different “league”, but she clearly loves her high end lifestyle and embraces that again with new respect for others.  This can be read as a stand alone.  If the other books follow the same plot line but with different narrators, I can imagine the story might get uber predictable.  7th – 10th grade girls into fashion and drama will enjoy this flighty, fast paced read.