You have NEVER stayed at a hotel like this!  Leo is the son of the janitor at the most amazing hotel in the world.  Each room has a theme – for instance, there’s the room dedicated to pinball, which turns into a giant game of – yes, pinball!  When the owner of this fantastic place disappears and the hotel starts to show signs of sabotage, Leo finds himself uniquely qualified to protect his beloved hotel. Carman’s Whippet Hotel fits comfortably beside the likes of Roald Dahl’s Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and Jody Feldman’s Golly Toy & Game Company.  Although Carman inserts a cast of wacky characters and an intriguing mystery into this book, the world-building is the real appeal.  Each room is vivid and exciting, and kids will enjoy exploring the entire hotel as Leo solves problems and mysteries throughout the plot.  Children who enjoy solving puzzles and exploring new places will love this book.

National Parks have not been around forever.  There were many steps required to create a protected lands system in the United States.  Theodore Roosevelt played a pivotal role during one of those important points in history.  This book tells the story of one camping trip which influenced Roosevelt’s passionate advocacy.  In the middle of a busy trip across the states, President Roosevelt spent several days with the naturalist John Muir, camping in the land which would become Yosemite National Park.  This is an approachable piece of a much larger story, told in simple, concrete terms.  The men are referred to using their childhood nicknames, and the story is told chronologically, with short paragraphs on nearly every page.  The text is complimented by full color illustrations, which are surrounded by white space until the men enter the wild land, and which then engulf the pages.  Mordicai Gerstein’s depictions of redwood forests and Yosemite Valley are particularly stunning.  This is a lovely story spotlighting a little-known piece of history in a way that will be approachable to young and old alike. 

Boxers, long johns, trunks, and underpants!  The rhymes in this book describe the undergarment preferences of the occupants of a zoo obsessed with underthings.  The animals are illustrated in goofy bright colors, and depicted in semi-realistic zoo settings.  While some of the rhymes are clumsy and there are better examples of adjacent themes, the illustrations are engaging and silly and will pull in readers.  Librarians and teachers will likely choose other titles for group sharing, but this title will attract individuals who enjoy giggling at ridiculous pictures of animals in underwear.

My kids grew up with Franklin, and he was one of their best friends.  Franklin had fears just like all kids and learned how to deal with it, and in doing so, taught other kids how, also.  This book has beautiful, fresh illustrations.  Also included is a copy of Paulette’s first manuscript, a copy of Brenda’s storyboard, and some history of the series.  It’s a beautifully bound book perfect for the younger kiddos in the library.

I began taking my children to museums when they were young, because I believed it helped their creativity, imagination, and understanding of the world.  I wish I had this book during that time, because it explains so nicely how the museum works.  Did You Know factoids appear in colored bubbles on every other page.  In the back, the book mentions how to make a museum of your own, explaining who you are.  I guess that how I can explain the boxes of stuff I’ve kept for each of my children.

This book teaches language, but in a very round about way.  This non-fiction book, aka picture book, has monsters as the theme and different ways they can walk.  The purpose is to understand that words can have the same meaning, but words also convey attitude and intensity.  This book would be good to use in teaching writing and word choice.  The very last page explains this well.  The illustrations are engaging and highly detailed.

This is book number six of this series, so someone must like them, however, I find that hard to believe.  This story goes all over the place.  The first scene is the pet shop owner is no longer selling pets and instead is purchasing odd supplies for odd animals.  No wonder he’s going out of business.  Then, as he needs to sign for a delivery, he can’t find the pen that’s obviously behind his ear, and calls it a store robbery.  C’mon, kids aren’t that easily entertained or fooled.  This is a waste of ink and paper.

For little girls who love fairies and love to draw, this is the perfect book for them.  Curto shows a step-by-step process to create four different fairies in different poses and includes pages of specific hairstyles and clothing.  Also included are how-to-draw various foods, butterflies, birds, and accessories.  Curto’s process shows how to look at common objects and view them from different angles. The step-by-step drawing techniques  make drawing successful and  pleasurable.   This will be a popular drawing book in our school.

Alphabest is a language book/picture book meant to help children learn how to use comparative adjectives.  The picture book portion is how it is arranged, giving alphabetic examples in a picture book format.  The setting is at circus or carnival and gives illustrations of each adjective, comparative and superlative of one specific word.  In a few of the examples, you can’t really tell the difference between the comparative and the superlative.  However, kids will be drawn to the illustrations and enjoy them.

This is a great non-fiction book all about ‘wolf’ spiders–who would’ve known that there are around 2,400 species of just wolf spiders.  Wolf spiders differ from regular spiders in how they catch their food.  Regular spiders spin a silky web and wait for it’s prey to become trapped.  Wolf spiders hunt food and jump on them and inject them with venom; they use their silk to line their homes.  This amazing book gives detailed information, and within the text, there are words written in red that can be found in the glossary in the back of the book.  When you open to a page, you’ll find one page of text and the other page a full-page photograph, showing the most minute details of the wolf spider.  Also is included an interesting factoid or caption info.  I am anxious to check out the other 40 non-fiction books about animals in this series.  They would make an excellent addition to any school library.