Another first-day-of-kindergarten story, but it’s a cute one.  At first everything seems to be going wrong for Polka-dot, as she keeps accidentally breaking Kindergarten rules, and she manages to get off on the wrong foot with one of her new classmates, who looks like she’s shaping up to be a first-class meanie.  By the end of the day Polka-dot seems ready to declare Kindergarten a complete disaster, until Liz (aforesaid meanie) faces a crisis and Polka-dot is able to come to her rescue.  Before long the two are fast friends and Polka-dot is feeling like she can tackle school after all.

This book is really cool.  I would give it an R* if it didn’t have such a limited audience for the text.  The illustrations include a single black line that traces through the entire book, connecting words and pictures in one long continuous thread.  The rest of the artwork that surrounds this single black line is very bold and graphic, and invites the reader to study the pictures.  The text walks the readers through different parts of a school, developing school-readiness skills by asking them to count and look for clues and identify animals and colors, etc.  Many folks will be intrigued by the illustrations, but children over a certain age will find the text babyish.

A great book for helping children develop an understanding of the fine line sometimes necessary to balance honesty and tact.  When Kim has a lesson on honesty at school, she declares a policy of always being honest, but she takes it too far, thinking it’s no longer okay to pretend to be a princess, but that it is okay to say everything she thinks, even when it’s hurtful to others.  Of course this causes problems with friends.  In the end, she discovers the trick of finding something to say that is both truthful and kind.

Good rhythm & rhyme. Cute pictures depicting the secret life of toys playing on their own while their boy is away (sounds like Toy Story — already been done, with more style). A few brief words on each page tell a simple story of stuffed dogs as traffic cops. It’s fine. Some kids will like it, but there’s nothing about it to really make you go oooh. Strictly for the younger set.

Fourteen common and exotic birds are captured in this volume, each with it’s own two-page spread including a vibrant, close-up, full-page photo, a paragraph of factual background information, and a poem to capture its personality.  Obviously put together by folks who love the birds involved, this book is sure to capture the appreciation of folks who didn’t know they cared. It’s lovely.

The illustrations are bright and colorful and fun, but the story doesn’t quite live up to them: it’s basically one long request of a young boy asking his local librarian if he can bring a woolly mammoth to the library.  He anticipates potential problems and offers solutions, and then eventually decides Woolly would be homesick, so instead he wonders if a Saber-toothed tiger could visit instead.  It sort of seems to lack a climax or point.

The fourth book in this series of graphic novels for younger readers finds the inhabitants of Mr. Venezi’s pet store faced with the need to adjust to a new helper in the store.  When Mr. Venezi takes on a teenaged assistant, she starts organizing everyone out of their comfort zone.  As usual with this crew, misunderstanding abound until the animals save the day.  When I first read one of these books, I thought it was kinda cute, but wasn’t sure how kids would respond.  The first two books have had nothing but positive feedback from students — I’ve had both gifted and reluctant readers asking me for more.

Fifteen different types of homes from different parts of the world and different periods of history are each described on its own two-page spread, illustrated by rich, detailed collages.  For every home, the introductory paragraph begins with, “If you lived here…”  After sharing some anecdotes of what life would be like in that house, individual paragraphs are dedicated to sharing the facts about house type, materials, location, date, and one fascinating fact. A world map in the back of the book plots locations for all fifteen homes.

The illustrations are really kind of cool, which is what led me to pick the book up, but the story is really pretty lame — the main character is an obnoxious little snot who whines and complains and is basically rude in every way (with a parent who apparently lets her), until she falls asleep one day and dreams about a circus where each performer insists that she demonstrate some iota of politeness before she is allowed to participate; when she wakes up she’s a new child, all politeness. Ugh.

On the one hand, it’s got cute, colorful pictures, and sneaks math into the story, but really it’s a bit contrived and not as charming as I hoped for.  The new bunny in the balloon factory who’s charged with counting all the balloons isn’t observant enough to realize he’s popping them all as he goes?