It’s a beautiful story, beautifully illustrated.  Inspired by a true story of the transformation of San Diego’s East Village, the story begins with a little girl who likes to paint and color and draw:  the opening page is a rather dark, very gray drawing of an urban neighborhood, with the one bright spot on the page coming from a peek into the little girl’s bedroom window, hung with her artwork.  On her way to and from school in this rather gray neighborhood, we see her passing out her bright, colorful drawings as gifts to those she passes by, and she tapes one to the side of a building.  Then one day she meets an artist studying the picture she hung upon the wall.  They introduce themselves, he shares his brushes and paint, and together they begin painting a mural.  As they work, more and more neighbors come to join in and the project grows until the whole neighborhood is beautiful.  Throughout the story, the tone of the illustrations gradually change, adding more and more color, until the final page is full of color, with a lone gray building on the far edge of the page, inviting the reader to imagine to the project going on and on.

This really has quite a substantial amount of information for a Rookie Reader.  Each two-page spread is dedicated to another idea for practical things individuals can do to help keep the planet clean.  It begins with a page dedicated to “invisible” garbage, encouraging kids to walk or ride bikes to places nearby to avoid contributing to air pollution and taking showers instead of baths to avoid wasting water.  It goes on to suggest growing one’s own food, composting, using reusable containers, donating things you’ve finished with, recycling, etc.  It ends by sharing some real-life stories about ways some creative things others have done to get their communities involved in this effort.

This is a beautiful and inspiring book.  The poem is a celebration of triumphs.  Even as it discusses atrocities in our history, it honors those who survived those atrocities, as well as those who didn’t.  The illustrations are stunning, full of humanity.  The text of the poem, combined with the illustrations, evokes emotion and sparks curiosity. In the back of the book are informational pages, sharing names and brief biographical blurbs of those depicted, as well as short explanations for various historical moments mentioned in the poem.  It is a book to springboard readers into further explorations.

What a beautiful book to celebrate one of humanity’s great scientific achievements.  The end pages at the beginning and end of the book provide just-the-facts context, with diagrams, sequences of events, data, and further information about America’s first trip to the moon.  In between, the story is told.  The text is poetic, and the illustrations help to convey the wonder and humanity of this shared experience to readers who are too young to have shared in it themselves.  A great book to inspire future scientists.

It’s a bit of an odd book.  It its way, it is a book of triumphing over loneliness, I guess.  It tells about a lonely turtle who knows only his own shadow, but decides one day to crawl out of his shell and make renovations to it.  What starts out as a new paint job leads to building a deck with a fireplace, and then planting a garden with a pond, and eventually moving on to building an entire town on the back of his shell.  This draws a whole community of other critters who decide to move in and Turtle isn’t lonely anymore.  The artwork is aiming for child-like, and is really quite successful at that, but the problem with children’s artwork is that it’s often difficult to see what they are actually trying to convey, and in that regard it failed to serve the telling of the story, I thought.

It’s fine, but not as good as I hoped it would be.  For one thing, since it tells me that the telescope came first, shouldn’t the subtitle be “from the telescope to the x-ray”?  The information is brief blurbs about assorted human inventions related to the ways we see, organized by topic, and roughly chronologically.  The accompanying illustrations are cartoonish.  There were a few confusing bits:  each two-page spread, dedicated to a particular topic, has some kind of connect-the-dots trail running through the illustrations, and it took me a few pages to figure that indicates the reading path if you want the information chronologically; if you read following the typical left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, it sometimes comes off a bit disjointed.  There are a few times the illustrations seem a bit disconnected too:  next to the blurb describing the first x-ray, in 1895, as one the inventor took of his wife’s hand, the illustration shows a chest x-ray being taken of a woman wearing shorts? In 1895? Really?

The social class system is very hierarchical in 1960’s Swaziland and especially at Keziah Christian Academy, a boarding school that Adele is sent to each year. Adele is a model student, studying extra Bible verses, following all of the rules, and making sure she knows how to maneuver in the game of remaining “on top” at her school. But things are changing and Adele has to deal. Her peer group is shunning her. Then she is assigned to room with Lottie, a girl far below her in status. But Lottie is rich in many other ways that Adele will slowly discover. A story of self-discovery and friendship, When the Ground is Hard was excellent. This is perfect for literature circles in schools as it will lead to discussions on social class, trust, family, peer pressure and growth. Hopefully, this story will be discovered by award committees.

Kasie West’s Maybe This Time is the teen Hallmark Channel version of a romance – squeaky clean with over the top “almost” moments–9 to be precise. Over the course of a year, Sophie Evans ends up at events in her small town only to be frazzled by big city-born Andrew Hart, son of the once-famous chef Jett Hart. Jett is working to help Sophie’s best friend’s family catering business gain more traction. Andrew doesn’t have a choice in working for his dad. Sophie attends these events as part of her job working for the local florist. Sparks fly at first like iron sharpening iron, but readers can see early on where this will go. While Sophie thinks she has interest in another boy, that is dropped within 6 months, but it will take the entire year for Andrew and Sophie outwardly admit their romance to each other. This is sap, sap, sappy! And some readers will love it! Totally appropriate for middle school too.

Fractured fairytale, story within a story, feminist critique, moral compass — all of these describe Jennifer Donnelly’s Stepsister. This frame story begins with Isabella, one of the evil step-sisters of Cinderella, known in this remake as just Ella, finding herself going to the ultimate extreme of cutting off her toes to fit her foot into the glass slipper. Blood everywhere, the Prince does realize that this is not his Princess. Jumping back to earlier times, readers see the pressure that would push Isabella to the extreme, mount as the stepmother is exacerbated about her daughters marrying well by being pretty enough. Isabella’s conscience is given a voice when Donnelly creates Fate and Chance, who game each other, putting bets on Isabella’s choices. This reader is not sure Fate and Chance needed to make an appearance, but aside from that, Donnelly has created a work of fiction that is thought-provoking about the importance society puts on “beauty” and hoping that Isabella will one day still get the Prince she deserves.

This narrative biography, Captured by Alvin Townley is an emotional book about our POWs from the Vietnam war.  Alvin Townley did a great job of giving us a descriptive narrative account of Naval aviator Jeremiah Denton from the aircraft carrier USS Independence, that was shot down and captured in North Vietnam in 1965. Denton was held in multiple North Vietnam prisons for seven and a half years as a POW.   While in prison Denton and other POWs were kept in solitary confinement for many years, and their only form of communication was through a complicated tapping system. They were tortured and starved daily while being held in the Northern Vietnam prisons for not giving any information to the Vietnam guards besides which were required by the Geneva Convention. Denton and his fellow comrades struggled with keeping their sanity during this time in such horrible conditions.  Denton kept the fellow POWs spirits up and continued his duties as best he could during this time. Denton led his men with honor through the longest and hardest deployment until 1973. Vivid and descriptive details along with actual photos of the POWs and the places talked about makes this readable and recommendable for anyone.