Jake loves playing on his championship soccer team but a family move results in him playing on the worst team in the league.  As in many of Mike Lupica’s books, the main character seems to have more maturity than most 11 or 12 year olds.  In Shoot-Out, Jake tests his sportsmanship and skills with helping his team grow as a unit.  Jake learns that Kevin is a superb kicker but is wallowing in grief for his mother who has recently died.  As captain, Jake feels he needs to assist his team both on and off the field.  Even though many of Lupica’s books share a common theme, the storylines are engaging.  The soccer commentary from the field is realistic, the action is lively, and the personal struggles and behaviors are believable.  Other Comeback Kids books include: Hot Hand and Long Shot, both about basketball, Two-Minute Drill, about football, and Safe at Home, about baseball.

Strictly a book for the youngest audiences.  Three hens try to work up the courage to go for a ride in the farm truck, but they are scared of the noise it makes and of the unknown world beyond the farm.  They decide to go together, but after Pip gets into the truck, the other two make an excuse to stall, and while they’re gone the engine revs, Pip gets scared by the noise and hides her eyes until it stops, and when she looks around she thinks the rest of the wide world looks just like the farm, until the other hens inform her she never really went anywhere, and they all decide sitting in the wheelbarrow is more their speed.  In some respects, it is a book about facing up to one’s fears, but at the same time, it’s suggesting that venturing away from home is something to be scared of.  Also, the text is written in such simple sentences as to be stilted.

The fun illustrations are as charming as in the other grandma and grandpa books by this author.  The text follows a day-of-the-week pattern, describing something different each day that Anya cooks with her grandma, and what they do with what they make, each item also representing something one eats at a different time of day.  On Saturday they make a cake, which they save instead of eating right away, because on Sunday Anya’s dad and dog arrive and they have a party.

It’s trying to cover too much information in a too simplified format for that information.  The result is shallow, surface statements, that seem a bit disjointed and unorganized. It’s bound to leave young readers with more unanswered questions that any real clear understanding.  I’d rather find a book targeting slightly older students — I think it would do it’s topic more justice if it had more words to work with.

I don’t like it when books make statements as fact that are really over-simplified generalizations.  In describing parts of a day, this one says, “In the afternoon the bus takes you home from school.” Yet not all kids ride busses.  It says, “Aftern dinner the sun sets and night falls.” Yet around here in the winter, that would likely happen before dinner.  It says, “One day rain falls. The next day the sun shines.” Yet rain could stick around for weeks on end or only last for half an hour.  It says, “Celebrations last a day.”  Yet some celebrations last a week or a month.  It says, “You celebrate your birthday.” Yet not all families do.

The simple text has lots of rhyme, rhythm, and repetition to help emergent readers, and the illustrations add meaning to the text, to share with young dinosaur fans the processes involved in digging them up, jigsawing them to make sense, and rigging them together so that museum visitor can “dig” them on display. A page in the back offers further explanatory paragraphs to explain the simple text in the body of the book.

The illustrations are cute, and it’s great that when Chick get’s fired from the egg factory for not conforming to the plain-white-oval requirements, she continues with her passion of creating uniquely shaped and painted eggs, gets discovered and becomes famous for her artwork.  But the last page, when she declares her best creations, the prettiest things she ever made, are her babies, could either be taken as a sentimental declaration for mothers to share with their children, so they know how precious they are, or it could be taken as a regression to the pre-feminism era, teaching young girls that the most important thing they can do in life is to bear children.

The illustrations are nice, the simple counting text rhymes, and I would probably recommend it for Australian audiences, whose young children would appreciate having a counting book that featured familiar images.  But the images and vocabulary are “absolutely Australian,” as the cover states.  It would’ve been more useful as a cross-cultural tool for American children if there were explanatory sentences or paragraphs to provide context/definitions.

The stated mission of the group publishing this series of books is to preserve our heritage of children’s folksongs.  If you share this mission, this may be a worthy addition to your library, but as a stand-alone picture book, it doesn’t hold up as well as some of the others in the series.  On the back of the book they spin it as a “great American nonsense song with a real tongue-twister for the chorus,” but really that means it’s hard to read aloud, many of the non-sense words leaving the reader unsure how to pronounce them, and the story seems to be that of a man who married a wife who’s a slob.  The illustrations do their best to try to make sense of the nonsense (with mice mirroring humans), but it seems a case of doing the best one can with what one has to work with.  The music is in the back, and maybe if I could read music the tune would’ve helped, but as is, it was an awkward read.

It might get recommended for libraries in New York, but kids who are unfamiliar with New York landmarks are going to miss a lot of the references in this book.  The illustrations are fun, and the story is cute:  it tells of a taxi driver who picks up a funny-dressed passenger who asks to be taken to Schmeeker Street, on the other side of town.  At a dead-end, the passenger pulls out a remote control that opens the entrance to the Finkon Tunnel, and leads to the other side of town (a very pink a green kind of place), where they root for the Spankees baseball team, have to drive around spotholes, etc. After dropping off his passenger, the cabbie makes his way home by way of the Snooklyn Bridge, and is much relieved when he finds himself back in Times Square, but when he gets home his family are all dressed in pink and green, and his wife is serving tweet loaf and bravy for dinner.