When a young vampire first gets his grown-up fangs he’s anxious to bite something, and runs all around the neighborhood driving everyone batty until he meets the new kids who’ve moved into the neighborhood.  When the boy he’s trying to make friends with is complaining about his little sister’s habit of biting, Moony goes along with declaring biting to be baby stuff, as he’s more interested in making a friend than in biting.  It’s full of vampiric plays-on-words.  Both story and illustrations are a bit on the bland side.

Essentially a wordless story, using a graphic novel, it tells the tale of a magician’s rabbit, and the mischief he gets into after the magician has gone home for the day, tormenting the dog, spilling milk, and generally creating havoc as he tries to get the carrots out of the magician’s kitchen.  Like other wordless books, it can serve as a useful writing or story telling prompt.

There will be plenty who will raise objections to the assuredness with with which the author speaks of a theory many still consider controversial.  The  first page of the foreward declares, “that theory has given us the correct explanation of our origins.”  My own objection that keeps it from getting a full-fledge recommendation has to do with the density of material: it is attempting to be a book for young people, but even I found it challenging at time.  It will be a good tool for students who already have a strong interest in the topic and the perseverance to wade through it.

It really does a pretty good job of taking some pretty complex concepts and making them comprehensible to kids.  It doesn’t brush over things or speak in too-broad generalities, but it uses kid language and examples to illustrate big ideas about how our universe works.  It also includes historical background on how our human understanding of gravity has changed over time.  A good selection of photos gives it visual appeal.

In keeping with the general style of the rest of this series, the book sets the stage to put the reader into the past, breaks information into small bits scattered around the pages that are illustrated in an engaging cartoon-like manner.  This volume does a good job of comprehensively explaining the short-lived history of the Pony Express, sharing who got it started and why, how it worked, and why it came to an end.  I’m just not sure how well it lives up to its title, as I can imagine many students reading it and thinking it sounds like a grand adventure they would’ve loved to be part of.

To be quite frank, I found this book a bit insulting to libraries, even though I know that was not the intent.  On the surface it’s a nice little story about a man who knows his town needs a library, and he wonders what he could do to help, and all it seems to take is for him to dig the hole, recruit a carpenter friend to build the walls, a plumber friend to add the pipes, an electrician friend to string the light, and to ask the townspeople to clean out their homes for the extra books they don’t need.  A quality library needs so much more: no mention of qualified staff, furnishings, computers, quality materials…talk about over-simplification.  In the end, I fear it undermines the true value of a quality library.

A shy frog is having a terrible time as her class prepares for their stage production.  Every time she tries to rehearse she is overcome by stage fright, and in the end she finds a way to contribute her own gifts toward the production by creating the scenery.  It’s got cute pictures, but I have mixed feelings about the message it sends: does it unintentionally encourage students to avoid things that take them outside their comfort zone?

The story of a shy little girl going to visit her neighbor who has recently moved into a retirement home.  On her first visit Lily hides behind her mother and refuses to say hello, but over the course of several visits she begins to make friends among the residents of the home, and by the end she’s celebrating her birthday with them. The illustrations are bright and cheerful and convey the distinctly Jewish features of the characters.  The book is not about being Jewish — its plot line is universal — it just happens to be set among a Jewish community, a group that has sometimes been left out of the wider trend toward multi-culturalism in children’s literature.

I’m not a fan of graphic novels. I picked this one up because I know I have a lot of students who are fans, but then I put off reading it because I didn’t want to have to.  Then it turned out I liked it.  A work of historical fiction set during the Napoleonic wars, it tells the story of a young boy on his first voyage with a British war ship.  The characters and the plot are well developed, and sidebars on each page provide definitions and context for historical references, and I’ve decided that graphic novels provide a particularly good format for introducing students to unfamiliar historical periods because the illustrations give them a visual of what it was like.

It’s not that there’s anything bad about the book.  It’s kind of clever in it’s own way: it’s basically a thinly disguised get-ready-for-the-changes-that-come-when-there’s-a-new-baby-in-the-house book.  The difference here is that the unasked for surprise that mom and dad brought home is a bear.  Some problems are the same (broken toys, busy parents); some changes are different (a bear can lift him up to see in the mirror and hold a broken tree branch).  The thing is there are so many of these books out there, and a library really only needs so many, and I think there are better ones.