Month: February 2024

Plague-Busters! uses humor, quip-ridden text and art to make STEM fun

There is a difference between a good book and a fun book. Good books don’t necessarily have to be fun and those fun books don’t always have to be good, in a literary or personal sense. You may read some tawdry summer beach love book about teenage vampires or romantic solo vacations to the edge of the world and they are 100% your jam, and others might not view them as good, but they sure are fun. Plague-Busters! Medicine’s Battles with History’s Deadliest Diseases is a fun book that’s laden with dozens of illustrations and snappy text that makes the world’s low points accessible, without watering down their scale.

Plague-Busters! Is an entry gate, heavily illustrated, entertaining chapter book with humor and science on the planet’s deadliest diseases.
Dancing rodents among the bulbous infection, c’mon in

Jump for Joy, a sublime new classic with a timeless story 

Jump for Joy is an illustrated book that shows two sides of the same tail. It’s simultaneously very basic, has thought-provoking art, and allows young children to fill in the blanks so that they can make the story their own. It has the quality that Billy’s walkabout in the Family Circus does where you’re innately drawn to run your finger along the path that he’s intentionally, and aimlessly walking to avoid something. In Jump for Joy you’ll find yourself tracing your finger over Joy, as well as, the dogs, even though they’re a two-dimensional drawing on the pages. It could be an attempt for your subconscious to make the book last longer, but you’ll do it too and probably won’t be able to figure out why either.

Jump for Joy is a timeless story about a girl and a dog who both need each other, paired with pitch perfect art.
The art. The simplicity of the story. The universal appeal.

The Secret Society of Aunts & Uncles proves this naysayer wrong

The Secret Society of Aunts & Uncles lingered on my bookshelf for a little bit. It lingered there because it’s co-written by Jake Gyllenhaal. I don’t need to review an illustrated book with an impossible-to-resist cover that’s co-authored by a famous movie star. Stay in your lane actor man. Still, The Secret Society of Aunts & Uncles beckoned me like a siren from the steep cliffs. I was in my boat of pointless bias and the land was the area of great illustrated books that I hadn’t read yet.

The Secret Society of Aunts & Uncles is the charming story about a club that teaches siblings of parents the ways of how to be cool to nieces and nephews.
Celebrity author, it’s super duper in this instance

Schnozzer & Tatertoes: Shoot the Moon!, is a new elementary tentpole

When does a book beget a series? Sometimes a book series is forced upon readers. It’s part of a bigger story to tell with the promise of multiple books to leisurely tell the tale that didn’t mandate so many books in the end. And other times it’s a genuine story, the evolution of characters who readers want to spend time with. The latter is important and one of those things that have the ‘it’ factor for elementary-aged readers. Schnozzer & Tatertoes: Shoot the Moon! is the second book in this graphic novel/comic book series and it has the ‘it’ factor.

Schnozzer & Tatertoes: Shoot the Moon! establishes itself as one of the big dogs in elementary school graphic novels.
Easy to read

Monsters Never Get Haircuts, say hello to a new classic

Monsters Never Get Haircuts is a fabulously strange book that looks like it’s from another dimension. In this universe, children’s drawings are the currency of the wealthy and each illustration is handled twice by two masters who manage to make it freakier, yet more accessible. It’s a series of one-upmanship where the first artist dares the second one to improve upon it, and they do. All of this could be true about Monsters Never Get Haircuts except there’s only one artist in play, although they might have multiple personalities, I don’t know, and the text is refreshingly brief. Pre-K and early elementary school audiences will love this book for those reasons and the fact that it’s utterly original, yet familiar to their young souls.

Monsters Never Get Haircuts has the potential to be your pre-k kid’s favorite book. The art is awesome, text is brief and the story is very funny.
This book will be on your forever book shelf

10 Dogs adds up to a clever sibling that’s more than a counting book

Dogs are the Rodney Dangerfield of the internet. If your local human society is holding a newspaper collection drive they might say, we need your old newspapers to line the dog’s cages and the cats need something to read. * Having said that, dogs are awesome and although their meme appeal isn’t as high as cats online, their real-life presence is just as strong. 10 Dogs is the sibling to 10 Cats, one of the best counting books we’ve seen recently. When I saw 10 Dogs I did squint just a little bit because I feared that the clever premise would be used once too often. Instead, 10 Dogs goes in an entirely different direction that takes inspiration from cats but is its own funny, clever creation.

10 Dogs is a counting book in that it adds to 10 in a variety of ways that will make kids laugh, smile, grin, notice small details, with dogs.
Count, and count in a funny way with dogs and sausages
Copy Protected by Chetan's WP-Copyprotect.