With her first novel, This is How I Find Her, Sara Polsky develops a rare theme for young readers exploring the territory of a mentally ill parent, a child left to cope alone with that parent from too young an age and without explanation, attempted suicide, teen guilt and things left unsaid as the relationship of mother, daughter, and the family unfolds.

Sophie Canon has been mother figure to her bi-polar mother for 5 years, until the day she finds her mom near death from an overdose of pills. During the subsequent hospitalization and slow recovery of her painter mother, Amy, who feels her medication interferes with her inspiration, Sophie stays with the family that seemingly deserted her years before, whom she now feels she hardly knows. Frozen in silences, both Sophie, her cousin Leila, and her Aunt Cynthia finally learn to speak their uncertainties, to open the curtain of misunderstandings and fear that has hung too long between them. Sophie, too, realizes she cannot live for her mother anymore at the expense of her own life.

As she makes her way through her own pain and silence, she finds there are people around her who care, who want to know her thoughts, and who have reasons of their own for the distances that have kept Sophie and Amy so alone over the years. The plot is well crafted, the characters identifiable and well drawn, and each grows into better understanding of themselves, each other, and their needs by the happy conclusion of this book.

Highly Recommended

Charming story set in New York city during the early 21st century when libraries were not allowing children inside.  This story tells the life of Annie Moore, who was trained to be a librarian, and helped to revolutionize library access to children in New York city, setting an example for other cities and countries to follow.  Heartwarming story with bright and cheerful acrylic paints. Recommended.

French words are deftly intertwined within this story of a French mouse living near a beautiful cathedral who is hopeful to become the next tooth mouse, which is a “tooth fairy”.  Since she is so young and small, she is told that she doesn’t have much of a chance.  She enters the contest and the rules are stated: you must prove yourself brave honest and wise.  The wall of names of children about to lose a tooth was daunting and her greatest challenge was what to do with all of the teeth!  But, alas, this little mouse comes up with the wisest of ideas.

The illustrations beautifully assist in the story telling of the young Chinese American girl who is learning to use her chopsticks as adeptly as her older family members.  Her perseverance pays off as she succeeds by the end of the story with the encouragement and support of her family.

This is a cute book that has only one word “BALL.”   The illustrations are what make this book so fun and entertaining.  Most everyone can relate to a dog or cat that has a toy that they obsess over. This is a very fun book.

This book has fun pictures but the story line seems to have no real conclusions.  Maybe for kids who like to imagine their own solutions, this could be an interesting book, to me, it just seamed to ramble around.

The drawings are cute, but the colors are a bit drab.  The story is similarly drab: it tells of a Mama elephant (whose child is a chicken), who puts on a silly hat, goes to the market, buys some stuff, fixes a flat tire on the way home, and enjoys her purchases.  There’s not much in the way of character development or anything to make the reader care about the plot.  I’m not sure what the point of the story is.

A beautiful book of poems, all inspired by things one might see on a walk through some back-yard woods.  The poems illustrate a variety of poetic forms.  The illustrations are charming and set the poems off well.  A nice tool to inspire young poets to see what inspiration they may find in their own back yards.

The illustrations are bright and vibrant and beautiful.  The words are full of rhyme and rhythm and repetition.  It’s a counting book, counting both up and down as the polliwogs plopping in the soggy bog turn into grimpy-grumpy frogs siting on the mossy log.  It’s got a variety of adjectives.  All-around, it’s a fun book for very young readers, which somewhat reminds me of Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom, for its use of sounds and playing with words.

It’s a very attractive book, with a shiny cover and a sturdy binding and lots of visuals.  I also like that vocabulary words are bolded and defined in the margins, right on the page where they are found.  Unfortunately, I found the text a bit surface-level, with a lot of generalities, and sometimes statements that even seemed contradictory: in the introduction it starts out by telling us how stable the Egyptian government was for 3000 years, and then in the first chapter it goes on to list a litany of wars and changes of dynasties, interspersed with periods of chaos and civil unrest; on page 68 it tells us, “Royalty, the wealthy, and children were the only people with leisure time,” but a few pages later it states that, “Board games were a popular way for both the poor and the wealthy to enjoy family time.”  More than once the book tells us that for a long time experts in Egyptology believed one thing, but that now they believe something else, but the reader is never told what the evidence was that altered long-held understandings. Also, the “timeline” in the back of the book simply lists a series of dates horizontally, evenly spaced, even though some of the time periods cover 2000 years, and others only 300 years — there’s nothing in the spacing to provide a visual representation of the time involved.