Flora, the farm pig, reminds me of another farm pig, Charlotte, in Charlotte’s Web.  Flora, however, is much more curious and adventurous.  She wants to see who and what’s out there in the big world.  She listens to what the cat and horse say, and practices techniques they use.  Through a series of mishaps, she ends up on board a ship bound for Antartica–she thinks she’s going to be trained as a sleddog, but the ship’s cook has other ideas.  She finds and aids friends, survives a crash and ends up in Antarctica, just what she wanted.  Through times that show her strength of character, her kindness and thoughtfulness, and sheer heroics, she becomes a sledpig and actually saves the expedition.  This is a beautiful story of someone seeking and making their own adventures while being a hero and a friend.  I would expect this book to become a classic.

This is book two of four graphic novels in the Supergirl series- comic adventures in the eighth grade.

Superman’s cousin- Linda Lee is an eighth grader at Stanhope Boarding School. Linda is trying to figure out how she fits into the scheme of things when in her school’s science geology lab Kyptonite is exposed and filtered through the light of an overhead projector.”ZZRREOOOAAAZZZ!” a dark haired duplicate of the blond (Linda) Supergirl pops into existence. The same, but opposite. Super villain. Version B or Belinda Zee proceeds to hang up campaign posters of Linda Lee for Class President “for an election that doesn’t exit!” Later, when Linda confides in Belinda in an attempt to become friends, Belinda secretly tape records the conversation, only to play the tape over the school’s P.A. system – embarrassing Linda. As Book #2 ends, Linda has made a friend with another new student – Lena Thorul. Unknown to Lena, her new friend Linda is cousin to Superman, who put her big brother in prison.

Includes five discussion questions in the section- Visual Questions and Prompts.

This graphic novel is set beneath the graveyard at Underworld Elementary School in Forever Fifth Grade, where everyone is dead.

Word play and bad jokes abound as Dedbert and Skully find their world falling in on them , as the graveyard above them is being bulldozed by order of the upper world’s city mayor.

“over my dead body…graveyard — it’s usually dead quiet… you don’t dig graveyards?… cross my heart and hope to live… grave situation… feel it in my bones… can’t just roll over and play dead.” are but a few of the phrases that will haunt/greet  the reader.

Includes – 5 ‘visual questions’.

Author Denise Downer “has written shows on today’s top networks, including Fox, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network.” And illustrator Otis Frampton “has illustrated many of today’s top properties, including Star Wars, The Avengers, Lord of the Rings, and more.”

When I think of sports- football, basketball, or baseball come to mind. BUT this book is set in Navajo Country where rodeo just may beat out all other sports.

Enthusiasm  for rodeo exudes from the pages of this book as each rodeo event is presented with a free-verse poem, a rodeo MC as he introduces each event, and a description of the event.  Includes: Grand entry, wooly rider, bronc riders, calf roper, barrel racer, steer wrestler, team roper, and bareback bull rider.

The photography which fills each page and the expressions on the participants faces captures their souls for that moment in time.

Sometimes trying to doll yourself up, or change into something you aren’t, backfires. Glamsters is the story of two sister hamsters who are awaiting adoption in a pet store.  One is worried she’ll never get a home and so she makes herself into a ‘glamster’ or glamorous hamster.  When her sister awakens and sees her, she freaks out.  Realizing that trying to make yourself into something different won’t work, it’s not natural.  So one sister cleans the other one up and the act of taking care of one another is what attracts a young girl looking for a pet.

Zena wakes up to a gray, colorless room and embarks on a journey outside to find the colors.  Each page she comes to is one color whereby kids can name all the things that color.  The book introduces the primary colors first and then the secondary colors.  Each time a new color is introduced, Zena’s hat turns that color, and a polka dot on both her and her dog become that color.  At the end all colors join to become a rainbow.  There is a color wheel activity at the end, which is written for people with absolutely no experience doing art with little kids.  Preschoolers totally enjoyed this book.

Sometimes you just wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and that’s what we call grumpy.  Maya, a little girl, didn’t know why she was grumpy, she just was.  Everything she did was done grumpily.  But grandma had the fix and slowly, slowly, a little bit at a time, grandma got her to smile and be happy, all by going to the park to play on Maya’s favorite toys.

Three Cheers for Trees explains to young children through the use of text and clear photographs how important trees are to earth and to us, by providing clean air.  Although the message is a good one, I believe that the definition and examples of fossil fuels were weak.  There could have been better explanation as to how people or machines use these fuels before explaining how to decrease our carbon footprint.  A valuable, but weak message.

Clear, colorful photographs on each page distinctly show what each letter of the alphabet stands for, and there doesn’t have to be any imagination to figure it out.  Football covers it all.  Either kids know everything about football or they seem to know nothing.  This book does a good job of explaining some basics.  Considering I read this book just before the Super Bowl and the Seahawks were on their way, all kids were eager to learn more.  It makes a good addition to our school’s library.

Blue’s world has exploded — literally.  She is on the run but she’s not sure what from.  Slivers of flashbacks haunt Blue but she just can’t put together the whole picture.  Lisa Jahn-Clough unfolds the mysterious back story of Blue’s before life in alternating chapters with her present tense scared, homeless self in her novel Nothing But Blue.  Now on the road east, Blue learns to eat out of garbage cans and avoid staying in one place for long.  But people recognize her.  They say her face has been on the television.  But why?  “All dead. No one survived. All dead.”  This is the chant that keeps Blue in the shadows.  In the shadows is where she befriends one magical dog that guides her through challenges again and again. Aptly named Shadow, the team continues east in search of a to a time where she was comfortable, even if a little insecure.  Jahn-Clough weaves familiar teen issues of self-image, sex, independence, and parental angst in a story about a girl that needs to learn to trust herself and to move on despite the horror she witnessed.  Recommended for grade 9 and up.