A beautiful picture book, sharing the history behind the origins of ragtime music and the Charleston dance moves, this book also shares wider themes of turning bad into good and doing for others where you are able.  It tells of a pastor in the south at the end of the 19th century, who took in young boys and began an orphanage.  To drown out the noises from the nearby prison, he taught the boys music, and in order to earn money to support the orphanage (with dreams of someday buying a farm where the orphans could learn to support themselves), he took his band traveling.  They were so popular they were invited to England to play for King George V.  When WWI broke out, the Reverend Jenkins spent the band’s London earnings to help stranded Americans come home.  End notes in the back offer more detailed information about famous musicians who had connections to the Jenkins Orphanage Band, and how its influence spread.

I really love the illustrations, but the story leaves me a little flat.  It tells of a chicken who lives in a quiet yard on a quiet street, but is picked up on a strong wind one day and dropped into the big city.  After a day of exploring she takes a train and follows some pigeons back to her own yard, where she continues her normal life, with occasional trips on the train.  It’s fine, but it’s just kinda bland.

The illustrations are gorgeous! The story tells of a family reunion in Tanzania, with relatives visiting from America.  In celebration of the grandmother’s 85th birthday, the family goes on a safari together, ending at Bugamoyo, the remains of an old slave-trading post, where the father explains to the children the experiences of their ancestors.  The book ends as the American relatives prepare to return, but the family counts their blessings because they enjoy the freedom to travel back and forth, and Grandma reminds them all that even when they are apart, they are always under the same sun.  While sharing a common family theme of separation and coming together, the illustrations do a wonderful job of providing an authentic look at a distant land that would be foreign to most American students.

An inspiring tale, describing the author’s own experiences growing up as a stutterer.  He shares what it was like being misunderstood by well-meaning adults, his coping strategies, and his comfort being able to speak freely to animals.  All the extra time he spent with animals because of his stuttering led him to discover his passion, and a promise to be a voice for them some day, which eventually led to world travel as a zoologist and conservationist who convinced the prime minister of Belize to open the first jaguar preserve.

The first problem with this book is the biased scope of its coverage:  the title declares it to be about “History’s Most Troubled Eras,” but the other than the opening page about the middle ages, and the final page which mentions world-wide poverty and terrorism creating dangers today, every other era selected is directly tied to U.S. history, and we haven’t existed for most of history.  Even if the retitled to be about America’s most troubled eras, the selection of material is arbitrary: no mention of either of the world wars; the pages describing the dangers of exploration and colonial times don’t even mention the small pox that decimated Native American populations.  Finally, the surface level of information is so vague as to be mis-informative generalizations: it describes the cold war era as 1947-1991, and then goes on to claim that during the cold war students had nuclear raid drills, illustrated by a black-and-white photo from the 1950s.  As someone who grew up in the 1970s & 80s, I can tell you we never once had a nuclear raid drill at school.

A very early chapter book, the first in a new series of twisted fairy tales, this falls into that category of kid humor that us grown-ups can’t appreciate, but they’ll probably love it.  The heroine of the story is named Princess Pink, but she’s ademently against both princesses and the color pink, the anti-girly-girl.  In search of a midnight snack she opens her refrigerator one night and falls through to a mysterious land where she meets Mother Moose and Moldylocks, with whom she visits the home of the three beards.  Instead of porridge, they sample chili in which a spider is taking a bath.  When discovered by the beards, Princess Pink makes her escape, but Moldlylocks is captured.  Guilt-ridden for leaving her new friend behind, Moldlylocks returns, disguised as the beards’ grand-pappy, and rescues Moldlylocks from being made into chili.  I’m not ready to give it a whole-hearted endorsement, but I’m ready to consider purchasing the first few books in the series and see how the kids take to them.

Fabulous book! So good, on so many levels!  First, of course, you’ve got a highly appealing topic (dolphins rank right up there with horses for animals girls instinctively want to read about), and the gorgeous color photos immediately bring out the “oooh!” factor that draws so many people to dolphin tourist sites.  The text flows and is highly readable, and packed with information, not only about the dolphins themselves, but about the scientists and their methods for studying them.  It explains how we know what we know and it recognizes that there’s a lot we don’t know.  I learned a lot, and it left me wanting to know more, not because it left things out, but because it reminded me that there are still mysteries to be discovered by human understanding.  Fabulous book!!

There are way too many really good books about Santa out there to waste time or money on one this poor.  It’s not constructed well:  the binding will never stand up to library usage, and the many items glued into the book to give it three-dimensional character are often misaligned, at times even covering up the words. It’s not written well:  intended to be written in Santa’s voice, it babbles along is a random string-of-consciousness that makes Santa seem annoyingly ADHD (and it’s not punctuated well).  And it’s not illustrated well:  it includes a variety of illustration styles that, instead of coming across as eclectic, just seem disjoined.

Who can resist chicken jokes?  This book includes not only riddles, and knock-knock jokes, but fun facts, limericks and tongue twisters as well.  Besides the fun that makes joke books a good draw for reluctant readers, they also represent a good tool, as “getting” the jokes requires fairly sophisticated understanding of language.  This title represents a good value on several levels:  quality binding, a wide selection of types of jokes, limericks, and tongue twisters, and a significant number.  Besides, some of them a really funny (admittedly, some are groaners).  Color pages would make it more visually appealing, and it would’ve been helpful if the tongue twisters were labeled as such, as some children will be perplexed by them (the limericks and fun facts are labeled, but the tongue twisters are set apart by text boxes only).

Fans of the other Alcatraz books will enjoy spending time with these characters again.  In this installment Moose’s dad has received a promotion, and rumors indicate the cons could be out to get him.  When Moose and his sister are left alone one evening and fire breaks out in their apartment, Moose is left struggling with the guilt that his negligence could have contributed, the worry that someone might have set it on purpose (and the puzzle of trying to figure out who), and the neighbors’ accusations against his sister.  The kids on the island band together to try to solve the mystery, and end up uncovering more than one island conspiracy.  The way things are tied up a little too neatly and too abruptly at the end, without enough clue-dropping along the way, keeps it from getting a higher rating.