This is a splendidly gorgeous re-telling of the traditional tale.  The paper is heavy, quality paper.  The illustrations are stunning.  The characters have personality.  It’s all together delightful.

So I only made it an additional purchase because it is yet another new-baby-arriving-in-the-family book, and I guess you really only need so many of those, but if you’re not overloaded already, and are looking for another title along these lines, this is a good one.  I almost gave it a full-fledged recommendation.  Most of the book is dedicated to a little brother telling about all the things his big brother can do.  Along the way he refers to a secret they share, and in the end it turns out that the little brother becomes a big brother.

The main character is already familiar to students.  The illustrations are vibrant and inviting.  The text is simple and straightforward.  The story manages to endorse reading and prepare young readers for a new baby in the family at the same time.  It’s a good combo.

Because just a few sentences of text on each page are accompanied by large color photos supporting the text, this book is a good tool for emergent readers.  Because all text is presented in both English and Spanish, it is good for language learners.  Often I find it a handicap when a non-fiction book is intended for emergent readers, because I find them light on information, but because this is a topic about which students often have little understanding, this volume is sufficient to give them a brief overview of how igloos are constructed, by whom, and why they are designed as they are. I learned several things myself.

A very basic volume for young readers that gives a general overview of how bodies work, presented in both English and Spanish.  Color full-page photos are accompanied by just a few sentences of text.  Useful for beginning readers and language learners, but not super informative.  For some kinds of information, diagrams of the inside of the body would have been more helpful in supporting the text than the photos provided.

I didn’t find it particularly well-written.  There was a lot of repetitiveness. The use of bullets was forced, like they just wanted credit for including non-fiction text features.  It does include a lot of time-period photos, but not nearly enough to support the text on a topic is inherently a visual one and which may be very unfamiliar to many readers (e.g. on the page describing women’s hats, the text describes five different kinds of hats, but only one is pictured).

I know all these picture search books are popular with my students, and I’ve seen a variety of them before, but this being the first time I’ve reviewed one, it’s the first time I’ve examined one this closely.  Besides the rich details within each photo, I was delighted to notice the way the sequence of photos throughout the book told a story without words, from the time the train set is carved, painted, sold, unwrapped, enjoyed, abandoned, yard-saled, refurbished, and enjoyed again.

A beautiful, imaginative poem inviting the reader to share in the joys of swinging on an autumn day.  The words and illustrations work together to create a lyrical delight.  A great introduction to poetical expression.

Ugh.  This book is trying to use a shiny cover and bright graphics to pretend it has something to say.  With only a sentence or two per page, it speaks in very broad generalities, often being presumptuous about describing schools today in ways that aren’t necessarily true about all schools, and much of what they state about schools in the past still applies at many schools today.  The only thing this book is really good for is as the example to use when teaching students to be critical readers recognizing over-generalized statements.

Light on information: relatively vague statements about what some believe versus what others say.  When reviewing another book in this series, I blamed the lack of substance on what happens when trying to write about “the unexplained.” But I recently read another book about Atlantis that had a lot more specific information to offer, describing in detail how and where the myth has developed across time.  I’m not sure whether the trade of substance for ease of reading is a worthwhile one — I suppose they each fit a different niche in the library, but if I had to choose just one, this wouldn’t be the one.