The Miracles of Jesus

 By Tomie DePaola

This is a fantastic book.  The pictures are done in the style of Medieval religious paintings.  The stories are written so that a three year old can understand them.  Mostly.

 But the miracles of Jesus are all pretty great stories and reasonably entertaining for children of any age.

I've sifted through a lot of terrible Christian books and I haven't seen anything better than this.  My daughter was intrigued.  Confused, but intrigued.

We don't do a lot of religion right now because it all goes over her head.

The Real Mother Goose

Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright

Hey, hey, hey!  It's the full book!  And it's widely available and constantly being reprinted.

This is a great compilation of all the essential nursery rhymes with tons of early 20th century Classical revival style illustrations.  Very Ars Nouveau, I think.

I'm no art historian, and I recognize that that description is kind of terrible.

 Look at this Robin Hood.  So effeminate.  Tall and lean with a baby face.  Pale blended watercolours with a fine outline.  I love it.

There are many, many full page illustrations, and most pages have smaller illustrations intertwined with the text.

The text is a little old fashioned.  A lot of death and gore and stuff, just the way it's always been.  But you can always pick and choose which rhymes you read aloud.  It's a big thick hardcover.

And It Was So

 Published by the Westminster Press Philadelphia
Illustrated by Tasha Tudor

This book is not bad at all.  Totally Presbyterian, but the parts they pull from the bible are heavily edited to be understood by kids, so whatever.

 The only problem I have with it is that it pulls from way to many sections.  It starts with Genesis, which is great.  And then it moves on to a whole bunch of psalms.

It sneaks something in there about the son of God being born and how he loved children and stuff, which is nice.

The pictures are really nice.  But it's all blonde white kids, and there's this one page about spreading the news throughout the world that has bunch of kids in traditional outfits from foreign countries.  It's a bit white-savior/racist.  But it's an old book, too.  Maybe there's a new edition?

The Kingfisher Playtime Treasury

 Selected by Pie Corbett
Illustrated by Moira and Colin Maclean

This is a pretty good collection of children's rhymes, skipping rhymes, schoolyard games and the like.  They're appropriate for children a minimum of three years old.  There's lots of variety and they're organized by category.  A lot of heavily gendered rhymes about kissing boys and getting married, but that's because they're traditional. Some of the wording is not what I'm used to.

I'm planning on using it for upcoming birthday parties.

 The art looks like it's stolen from Janet Ahlberg.  They included Each Peach Pear Plum, though they use different lines.

And they seem to have a Jolly Postman, too.

Really weird.  But I guess Janet is dead now, so it's fair game?

Disney Anytime Stories Collection

 Written by Lisa Ann Marsoli

This volume is from 1996.  It's about as bad as you can imagine it being, which means that for some children I guess it's passably okay.  It has pictures in it, which is all they're really after in a Disney book.

The art here is spot on.  No weird modernization of older classics.  They tried to keep it very accurate, so that's nice.  The writing probably suffers from too many editors.

 The stories only make sense if you've seen the movies.  There is little or no introduction of new characters and little backstory.  It's basically a crazy compilation of Disney Fanfiction written for superfans.  My daughter has never seen any of these shows, so nothing in this book makes any sense to her.  The fact that the vocabulary is way beyond that of a 5 year old (my husband balked at the use of the word "pachyderm") only makes things more confusing.  Normally I'm all for varied vocabulary, but if I have to spend twice as long coming up with an explanation for the events and characters in the book than I would spend just reading what's on the page, it's not a very good book for kids.

It bothered me, too, that some of the events in these stories conflict with elements of their own universes.  I'm really not a Disney fan, and I was pretty annoyed, so I'm pretty sure a real hardcore superfan would burn up.  Or maybe a REAL superfan would be able to justify all the deviation.

Anyway, the book cost 25¢.  I'll probably tear out all of the full page glossies and do a craft with them or something.

Young Canada's Nursery Rhymes

 Illustrated by Constance Haselwood

Originally printed as a British collection of nursery rhymes in England, it was re-titled and shipped to Canada back when it was first settled.  A copy was found more recently and it was reprinted.

These original illustrations are fantastic.  The rhymes chosen are not all the most popular ones, which makes it a fun little book.  I'm happy that it exists and that I've found it, but it isn't nearly as appealing to my kids as other collections that I've found.

Ring-A-Ring O' Roses

 By Alan Marks

This is a fantastic collection of nursery rhymes.  I've been searching the library for something decent, and this one was hiding in the bookshelf at home.  The words are slightly different than what I'm used to in some cases, but it's close enough to the versions found in the Oxford collections.

Each page has several poems, and the pictures for the poems are blended together.  There's a lot of play with perspective in the paintings and the characters and settings are a-typical.

All of the standard rhymes are in there.  All of my kids' favourites.  I don't think I'll be able to find anything much better than this.

The Father Christmas Letters

 By J.R.R. Tolkien

This is a compilation of a few of the letters that Tolkien wrote to his nephews and nieces while pretending to be Father Christmas.  There aren't many letters, and they're mostly interesting for Tolkien fans, not so much for little kids.

 The pictures are delightful.  It's really sad that not all of the letters were published.  Probably because some of them were lost.

At one point Father Christmas has a war with goblins and learns the goblin language.  The goblin alphabet is in the back of the book.  Kind of interesting.

Alligator Pie

 By Dennis Lee
Illustrated by Frank Newfeld

A Canadian classic.  It's got a few poems in here about places in Ontario.  Lots of CanCon.  But most of the themes are universal.

They're actually well written poems.  The difference between this author and most "children's authors" is that this guy writes poems for adults.  He's an actual poet.  So everything rhymes properly without much repetition and the rhythm matches up and you don't have to re-read the same line twenty times trying to make it work.

 This edition is the collector's edition, so it's got some notes from the author.  The idea was to create modern nursery rhymes about things that they actually encounter rather than be about ha'penny and clinkers and princesses and paupers.

My daughter is much less interested in many of these rhymes, mostly because she's too young; they're longer and she doesn't understand most of them yet.  She's absolutely crazy for the main poem, Alligator Pie, though.  She's constantly reciting it under her breath.

The pictures in this book are so dated, but I love them.  It's a shame that this edition is out of print.  It was only printed in 2001. 

Oh, crap, that was 14 years ago.  I'm old.

The Eric Carle Mini Library

 By Eric Carle

This is a great little gift set that seems to be pretty popular.  The stories in it are actually pretty good.  There are some problems, but they're easy to gloss over.

 The problem with Rooster's Off to See the World is that the narrative is terrible.  But it's a counting story, and you count animals, so it's great for kids.  The ending is underwhelming, but I just play up the fact that rooster is getting a really good nap in and that he's really happy, and nobody seems to care.

 This book is basically perfect, but I didn't read the text until my daughter was much older.  She was obsessed with this book, and she still picks up sticks outside so that she can cut the pretend wheat with her sickle.

It's basically a long-form pancake recipe.

 Another great book.  This one has lots of pop-ups.  It has contributed greatly to our daughter's moon obsession.  I think she literally expects us to get the moon for her at some point, still.  One of the pop-up pages is ripped.  It was inevitable.

There are many problems with this book.  The main narrative of a hermit crab collecting sea things for his shell is great because it teaches about the life of the hermit crab, and also about the names of different things found in the sea.  (Although it omits that crazy shell exchange that they do and says instead that the hermit crab travels for a full month before he finds a new shell.  That's a little frustrating.)
The rest of the book is trying to do too much.  It tries to introduce months, which doesn't work because there's no way to make that concept any less arbitrary to a toddler who has limited memory anyway.  Each page where he collects a new friend is written the same way with different vocabulary.  But so little remains the same, and the vocabulary is so varied, and there's nothing to show exactly what any of the words mean.  So all of the language education in this book is totally lost on a young audience.


All in all, this is a great collection, though.  We love the colours, too.

Over the Hills and Far Away

 Collected by Elizabeth Hammill

This is a collection of nursery rhymes from "around the world", but mostly just from the states.  They include a fair number of staples from England or Ireland, but they also have some more modern playground rhymes.

 Some of the best rhymes are the Chinese-American ones because they work in English, possibly are originally written in English.

Some of the worst are the Native American rhymes.  Most of the non-English rhymes, in fact, have been translated poorly.  Maybe there's a way to read them that works.  But without any notation to accompany them, they're just rhythmless rhymeless words.

 There are, however, hundreds of poems and songs in this collection.  It's a big heavy book.  So it doesn't really matter that some of them aren't to my liking, because there's tons to choose from.  There's tons of art to choose from, too.  Each set of pages is done by a different artist in a different style.

I don't think I'd buy this book, but it was pretty great to take out of the library.

Rupert Annual

 We picked up this annual at the thrift store.  Look at those guys; they're going to fall on their heads and break their skulls! 

This annual lives up to all of my expectations of a collection of Rupert adventures.  In particular:

 Weird, blatantly racist stereotypes.

Unrelated craft.


(I also love how on the craft page it prefaces the instructions with a boast about how Rupert was so good at making the horse on his first try.  Just so you know, kids, he isn't a dunderhead like all of you!)










But the stories are jam packed with adventure and excitement.  We'll totally read this when the kids are older. 

The Real Mother Goose - Book One

 Traditional (Rand McNally & Co)
Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright


These are traditional nursery rhymes.  It's a little board book with a good selection and 1920's style art.

I like it.  It's basic.  It's exactly what I'm looking for in a nursery rhyme book.

Also, I got it second hand for a dollar, so the baby can chew on it.

The New St Michael Book of Noddy Stories

My mum loves Noddy.  She watched it on TV when she was a kid.  We found this at the local thrift store along with a bunch of other British books.  It was a good day for thrifting.

 I kind of love this book for a bunch of reasons.  First off, the vocabulary is very, very British.  I'm often translating things for my daughter who otherwise has no exposure to some of the terms.  Secondly, everyone is always angry with Noddy.  He isn't a mean little toy; he's just forgetful, unobservant, and thoughtless.  They're pretty unlikely characteristics for a hero.

Lastly, the stories are often not quite resolved.  The resolution is implied, but they don't walk you through to the conclusion.  And sometimes the conclusion isn't really very happy.  Noddy always pays the price for his failings.  It's a weird series of morality tales about absent mindedness.  Which is rough.  And Noddy is the beloved main character, too, so they set you up to really love him and then watch his inevitable downfall.

My daughter loves it for the characters and the bubbly drawings, though.  Narrative be damned! 

If you asked me why I hate Disney so much and yet give Noddy a pass, I wouldn't have much of an answer for you.  Maybe just because it's British.

The Oxford Nursery Treasury

 By Ian Beck

A generic book of Nursery Rhymes!  We've been looking for something for a while, but it's hard to know if something is good or not without seeing it first hand, so I'm going through whatever the library chooses to stock.


 The rhymes are some of the better ones taken from the full Oxford Book.  The accompanying pictures aren't bad, either.

But there are stories as well, and the stories are dreadful.  The tortoise and the hare, for instance, have a bet involving vegetables and they write the hare to be particularly odious so that you can feel particularly great about him losing to the tortoise.  I spent the entirety of "The Princess and the Pea" hoping that the two 12 year old royals didn't end up married at the end (of course, they do), and my daughter didn't care much for the story either; she cut in at the end to ask the only really important question, "DID THEY EAT THE PEAS!?!?"

It was reading this book that made me realize that I really hate most fairy tales.  I can't stand the popular ones, at least.  But I know that if I start in on things like "The Tinder Box" we'll be dealing with nightmares for weeks.  It's a real dilemma.

First Prayers

 These are uncredited.  Some of them are traditional prayers, some are nursery rhymes, and the rest are vague rhymes about God written specifically for the book.

This is a Catholic book because it contains the Hail Mary and the Guardian Angel Prayer.

It has a fun handle on it and some cut-out pages, so the kids like it.

It's a pretty good read.  It's a nice way to say prayers with a toddler who REFUSES to say prayers.  I like to sing the Our Father with the melody we use at mass.  That song's a big hit at bedtime.

The pictures aren't special.  The prayers written specifically for the book are dreadful.  But they're short, so whatever.

Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever

 We love Richard Scarry so much.  His books are old, though, and often compiled kind of weirdly.  This is no exception.

"I am a Bunny" is featured in this book, but most of the pages are missing, and there's an extra page with insects on it that isn't in our board book version.

Other stories seem to be complete.  The nursery rhymes are scattered throughout.  The prints are of varying degrees of quality.

You take what you can get, though.

 Not all of the stories are good, but the ones that we like to read are fantastic.  They label instruments, they explain colour theory, there's counting and letters and all kinds of educational fun.

My favourite is the alphabet of things to feed and not feed a hippo.  My daughter is on the edge of understanding comedy. If you ask her whether we should feed the hippo a nest or a nut, she will angrily explain that she already picked out the banana on the first page.

I'm sure she'll get the joke in a year or two.