Professor Astro Cat's Frontiers of SPACE

 By Dominic Newman
Illustrated by Ben Newman

Look at this book!  It's so 1950's!  But modern, too!  The cover has a lovely fabric texture with silver bits.  Some of the printed colours look like they dyed the fabric whereas others look like they're decals.  It's delightfully tactile and visually pleasing.

The facts inside are wonderfully up-to-date and thorough!  It's a real textbook laid out so that a kid could read and understand it.  It's so accessible that I read it to my 3 year old (but skip as many details as possible)

 This is one of our favourite graphics.  There's a full solar system on this page, plus a representation of the planets using round food items.  Every page relays the information in such a clear and accessible way.  My daughter often stands up on the couch and excitedly yells the facts back at us as we read it with her.  She really has a limited understanding of the information, but it'll come.  In the meantime, she still love, love, loves this book.

The pictures I've supplied do not do the book justice.  The graphic design throughout the book is astounding.  It's so well organized, especially considering the amount of information they cram in here.

The only problematic thing is that they really do include all facts, like animals sacrificed for science and the fact that the sun will explode one day and how if you get sucked into a black hole you'll turn into spaghetti.

I'm glad that they didn't skirt around these subjects, but it means that this might not be a good book for a very young, very anxious child.  Or you can just skip pages; that's what we do.

I Said Bed!

 By Bruce Degen

You can totally tell that this is the illustrator behind the Magic Schoolbus series.  But he isn't the same writer.

No matter, this book is fantastic.

 The interactions between the mum and boy are pretty bland, and then the crazy imaginary adventure is full of colours and lines and patterns.  It's really visually appealing.

My daughter can read this book.  It's got tons of repetition and very simple sentences.  Sometimes the characters only say one word each.

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.

All Around the Town

This is a book from my husband's childhood in Britain.  It's nice to have a book of British vocabulary, and it's also nice to have a super large picture book to pour over, but content wise, this is pretty sub-par compared to anything by Richard Scarry.

First off, the printing is cheap.  Some of the colours aren't printed in the lines.  The colour pallet is pretty bland and unappealing. 

The names of the characters are annoying, and only some of them have names.  The others are just "bunny" or "cat".  Though I guess that's a pretty minor complaint.

Some of the pictures have weirdly drawn perspective problems.  I'm not quite sure what's happening with this fence.  There are worse pages.  You can still tell what's going on, at least.

Scarry employs a lot of slapstick, and this book does not.  Some of the buildings featured are based on the same building frame, which is kind of boring.  My kids don't like reading the story, which is REALLY boring, but they do like looking at all of the objects and animals.

Overall, it's worth picking up if you can find it at a second hand store, but I wouldn't spend a whole bunch of money on it.

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?

I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato

 By Lauren Child

I was underwhelmed by this one.  It's won awards and has its own show and everything.  It's one of those 'teach your kids to eat' books.  I guess it's better than most.

 The art is a mixture of simple line drawings and collage.  It's okay, but it's a pretty dated look.

The premise is an older brother making up names and origins for ordinary food items in order to make them interesting and appealing to his younger sister.  The ideas are okay.  The behaviour is mostly plausible.

Of course the little girl eats every single thing.

I'm just really bored by this type of book at this point.  There are so many of these.

I don't think I'll bother with any of the other books in the series.

Hank and Fergus

 By Susin Nielsen-Fernlund nd Louise-Andrée Laliberté

Brutal.  Absolutely brutally bad.

Hank is a kid with a birthmark on his face who has an imaginary dog friend named Fergus.  It's made obvious in the beginning that he has this dog friend because he can't make real friends.  Probably because he gets teased about his birthmark and is embarrassed and then acts out.

 So a new kid moves in next door and tries to be friends with him and Hank gets all defensive and is horrible and mean to him.  So they're both horrible and mean to each other.  Which is usually how these things go down.

Then they make up and give each other presents in the most formulaic and artificial turnaround you could imagine.  See, making friends isn't that hard.  You just aren't trying!
No, I get it.  The moral of the story, that they explain in the last few sentences, is that having a birthmark on your face isn't so bad.  In fact, everyone has something weird going on.  Look at this kid; he's got a scar on his stomach!

This book won the Mr. Christie book award.

100 Things that Make Me Happy

 By Amy Schwartz

This book is great.  The art is cute, the happy things are well chosen, and it's easy enough for a beginner reader to fumble through.

 No sentences!  My daughter is trying to read, but more than two words in a row is way too much work.  This book was great to open at random and read together.

The rhymes work, the rhythm doesn't.  But it isn't supposed to be rhythmic in the least and doesn't have any kind of pattern, so that's refreshing.

Where Does Electricity Come From?

 By Angelo Gangemi

Published by GS science

This book wasn't so good.  Electricity is complicated, and the target audience here is too young.  I don't really feel like I understand electricity, and this book really highlights the things that I don't understand.

 Spin a magnet and get electricity on the wires!  First of all, I don't really understand magnetism.  I understand THAT it works and HOW it works, but why?  It may as well be magic.

On a side note, I learned about magnets entirely in French, and we just called the iron filings "fer", which meant nothing to me at the time.  It was all very mysterious.

The book has a section on generators and batteries and all the basics, but each paragraph has about three to five simple sentences.  It just leaves so many questions.  And I end up having to try to answer them off the top of my head.

I was hoping this book would talk about the dangers of electricity, or how it works in the house, but it really did neither.

And then I thought about how I have a serious phobia of being electrocuted that I developed after years of sitting through the hydro presentations for kids that included slideshows of serious burns on young children.  So maybe my kids don't need to know about these things until they're much older.

Jack

 By Tomie DePaola

I love this author.  I wasn't expecting much from this book.  And there wasn't much to it.

 I guess it's a book about animal noises?  And some people love them and some people hate them? 
Jack and all of his animal friends go to the city to live in a big apartment building together.  And that's the plot.

They just ask the king for an apartment, and the king gives them the key for one in the city.  The end.

But, you know, the pictures are nice.

Clementine in the City

 By Jesse Hartland

I have mixed feelings about this one.  My daughter begged me to renew it because she loves it so much.  It's written with printed text and hand writing, and the pages are sometimes one big picture and sometimes a collage of little pictures.  It's the story of a dog who goes to the city to get away from the boring suburbs.

 I don't really care for the story so much, but I do like how the character, Clementine, introduces herself on the fourth page or so.  I think the pacing is good, and the layout is great.  There's a new idea every two pages, which works well for a young kid's attention span.  The art is pretty decent, too.

The ending is particularly dull, though.  I think it would have been fine if it was just the story of the dog in the city meeting people and living, and maybe even working terrible jobs.  Instead, at the last minute they really tried to have a climax and some denouement.  It worked out fine, but it could have been better if it had been left more abstract and slice-of-life.

Do Not Open

 By Brinton Turkle

This book was so fantastic.  And we utterly destroyed it with a cup of tea.  Tragedy.

It's about a woman who lives alone by the beach with a cat and collects odds and ends

 The pictures are fantastic.  I yearn for a house decorated like hers.  Half of the book is just describing their lazy lifestyle, retired in a one bedroom cabin by the ocean listening to storms together.

The last few pages has them discovering a bottle with a monster inside.  The woman is not in the least bit afraid and defeats it easily.  She's granted a wish as a reward.

The pictures here are a little over the top and probably not appropriate for an anxious younger child, but the whole book is about conquering your fears, so it's a good book for anxious kids, too.

My severely anxious child loved this book.  But she's starting to develop an interest in scary things.

La Chenille qui Fait des Trous

 By Eric Carle

I always hated this book when I was a kid.  The first time it was read to me was in kindergarten.  We read it every time we went to the library for the next two years, except for the times that we read "I'll Love You Forever", which I also hated.  I hated it because it was a baby book and I was so tired of listening to my teachers fawn over it forever.  I was getting into chapter books for crying out loud.

But it is a great baby book.  I like reading it now.  And it's fantastic to have a copy in English and in French.  My daughter likes reading it in either language, because she already knows all her foods, so she understands at least a third of it. I'm hoping she'll start learning her days of the week soon.  We read both copies over and over.  I'll have to buy the French one soon.

Lifetime - The Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives

 By Lola M. Schaefer
Illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal

This book is longer than pictured.  It has huge pages and is great for cuddling up to read with kids.

It is also a counting book for older kids, which I very much appreciate.

 The animals featured are random, and the objects to count reflect an amazing part of that animal's life, like a caribou dropping its antlers, or a seahorse male birthing babies.

The illustrations are in this newfangled modern style, but not twee.  They're really nice.  I'm still finding this style of illustration fresh, probably because it's so clean and simple.

Mathematically, this book is actually useful because it counts by tens for a bit, then shows hundreds of things, then finally one thousand.  It's not about learning all the numbers in between, it's about visualizing numbers.  My kids aren't really old enough to comprehend the concept of one thousand, but when they're ready, this book will be perfect.

We still look through it anyway, because the animal facts are cool.

Moo, Baa, La La La!

 By Sandra Boynton

My kids both love this book.  My youngest makes me read it repeatedly.

 Mostly because it has animal noises that he likes to copy. 

My daughter likes this page, because she's starting to understand jokes.

The ending only made sense to my daughter after she was three.  She now makes funny noises and laughs when it's finished.  It's nice to have a book that I can read to both of them at the same time.

The Tiny Seed

 Eric Carle

A lot of these books are available as big hardcover books, but I like the board books better.  This one doesn't really make sense for the under two crowd, but it has nice colours and it can be pulled at and chewed on this way.  Having smaller pages doesn't take away from the art, and they didn't edit the books when they made them smaller.

This one is all about seeds from a flower going through all the seasons and finally falling to the ground and making a new flower.  It's about all the seeds that don't make it and why they don't make it.

And then there's this page near the end about how the flower is so big and everyone thinks it's so amazing.  This could have been left out.  My kids just don't care about that.

And then the flower dies and sends off new seeds, continuing the cycle.  It's a good teaching book about the life cycle of plants.

Bread and Jam for Frances

 By Russell Hoban
Illustrated by Lillian Hoban

This is a classic.  Francis is a great character, and we love, love, love this particular story.  It's another one of those "teach your kid to love food" books.  Except it isn't about the parent knowing that the child is just faking their dislike of anything but chicken strips.

 In this particular story, Francis just doesn't like being adventurous with food and is satisfied with the predictability of bread and jam.  Her parents let her eat bread and jam forever and eat tasty other things in front of her until she breaks down and cries.  It's a bit much.  But it's told in a charming enough way that I don't mind reading it anyway.  And Francis is delighted in the end to go to school and have a large and varied lunch that rivals her friend Albert's.

Now, I know kids like this, and my own kids are picky some days because they don't feel like being adventurous, and I get it.  I give them opportunities to try things without forcing them, but if I know that she's being unreasonable then I will put my foot down and force her to take a bite.  She can always ask for things that aren't on the table as long as she makes some effort towards something on her plate, which ultimately ends up in her discovering that she actually likes what I've made for dinner, anyway.  We know eachother's limits and we both make compromises.

And you know what?  Treating my kids fairly and letting them decide what they like and don't like and giving them options has worked great.  Occasionally forcing or bribing them to try things has worked out fine, too.  I guess the key thing is to know your kids and to work out a tactic that they won't find frustrating.

Books about kids with bad habits don't work.  Not unless they have a direct message to the reader about how they should change their ways.  Subtlety like this goes right over my three year old's head.