5 Stars. What a lovely book! It’s a realistic story but the illustrator captured the girl’s excitement in touches of whimsy throughout. The soft focus of the artwork gives the book the feel of a dream, even while the girl/woman is working hard to do real things. One spread near the end gives me goosebumps. I especially love […]
5 Stars. Oh my goodness! I loved this book! I love the way the illustrations subvert the text. If I were only reading the words, I would expect a stereotypical princess playing tea with her dolls (I love those little girls but that doesn’t reflect every girl’s interests). For example […]
5 Stars. Fatima is totally relatable. She feels overshadowed by her smart older sister and she doesn’t always feel like she fits in at school. She’s a little nervous about sleeping in a tent, especially when she and her sister spy a “monster” outside the tent in the night. They laugh the next morning when they see what it was [….]
Little Betty and Billy choose Walter and bring him home from the animal shelter. Mom makes them give Walter a bath because he smells so bad. But they quickly realize that the problem is deeper than that: Walter is a farting dog. Billy and Betty don’t mind but their parents can’t take it. They try to fix the problem with visits […]
The rhyming couplets and colorful pictures in this book are sure to please little readers (or listeners, as the case may be). The parade is full of colorful characters, some in fancy dress, others in outfits that can be found at a Village People concert, but all happy and excited to be a part of this celebration. The illustrator […]
Marlon Bundo is the BOTUS, the Bunny of the United States. He lives a lonely life in a big, boring house until one day he meets Wesley, the most bunny-beautiful rabbit in the garden. It’s love at first sight. They decide they want to get married and hop together forever. But the Stink Bug tells them that boy bunnies can only
marry girl bunnies. What can they do? […]
Young Mickey hears a noise deep in the night and finds himself falling into the Night Kitchen, where he has to help the cooks get the milk into the batter. What a fun little book! I never read much Sendak when I was little for some reason, so this was completely new to me. The […]
In this true story, Roy and Silo are two male chinstrap penguins in the Central Park Zoo who don’t quite fit in. They don’t take any notice of the female penguins and instead form their own little family. What an adorable little book! The illustrations by Henry Cole are charming. The story of Roy and […]
Wayside school is just a little different. The builder built the school sideways, so it’s 30 classrooms stacked on top of each other. Mrs. Jewls’s class is on the 30th floor. That makes for a long hike for her students. The students at Wayside are a little different as well. One boy has a literal […]
George Beard and Harold Hutchins are the 4th grade pranksters at their school. They change school signs around to say funny things, they fill cheerleader pom poms with black pepper, and they fill footballs with helium. Perhaps their favorite pastime, though, is writing comic books. They steal into the school office and make copies to […]
This is Neil Gaiman’s poem, “Instructions” bound as a picture book and illustrated by Charles Vess. I love this. I have to admit that when I first came across Gaiman’s poem in Fragile Things, I read it, thought it was pretty cool, and moved on, both in the book and in my head. It wasn’t […]