Children's book reviews, all age comic books, Kidlit, mglit, movies, entertainment and parenting
These are books that kids will want to read-or should read, but will enjoy doing so. Board book, picture books, kid lit, elementary school books, middle school books, high school books, all age comic books and more will be talked about here.
I’m a casual Star Trek fan. The most current spate of movies was OK, and I haven’t seen any of the three recent television shows. If that downgrades my level of Star Trek fandom then I’ll reset my phasers to busy. Star Trek: Trek the Halls is a holiday book that is laden with tribbles, puns, and references to classic characters. It’s an illustrated book that will send those Star Trek fans to their happy place.
The Vanquishers has a great title. Its name alludes to a once great team of vampire slayers who were so successful that their prey is now extinct. However, much like Doc Brown in the very last minute of Back to the Future, “It’s your kids Marty”. Now it’s a couple of decades later, the vampire hunters are older, and have families and grandchildren of their own. It’s the families of the original Vanquishers that still keep an eye on the rearview mirror. It’s a book with more heart than vampire horror but will deliver for those mglit audiences that want more silly, than scary.
I’m trying to remove any negative bias that I have against celebrity authors. This is a work in progress because the vast majority of times that I read one, it’s a disappointment. Also, in my perfect world, every child would learn a second language. The youngest child that I taught when I was an ESL teacher overseas was six months old. I mention that to illustrate that crawlers and toddlers have not built up the learning resistance to education. At that age, it’s all play, and learning through play is awesome. Immersion language study is far and away best way to get kids fluent in a second or third language. Now, in what may be our longest introduction ever, Con Pollo has great intentions but falls short on its main goal.
The subtitle to Con Pollo is A Bilingual Playtime Adventure. As our (very long) introduction implies, we love the goal of that. It’s an illustrated book that will introduce a handful of new words in a different language through happy characters in a relaxed setting. Indeed, we see a chicken, and as Breaking Bad fans already know, that’s a pollo on the front cover saying “Hola”.
Pollo wants to play all day and the book shows us examples of what she likes to do. She goes to the beach, plays soccer, goes skateboarding, dances, visits school, the library, stores, makes something, flies a plane, and looks at the stars. The text is presented in simple sentences with large font and bright colors that show pollo doing all of those things.
The illustrations are by Andrea Campos and are cute, engaging, and just the sort of thing that ages one and up will be attracted to.
Our biggest issue with Con Pollo, A Bilingual Playtime Adventure is that there is an astonishing absence of Spanish. There are 13 Spanish words in the book. There are more than 200 words in English. This is an easy reader book that’s intended to be read to young audiences while the reader and the audience are having fun and getting introduced to some key Spanish nouns and verbs.
Now, assuming that is the main goal of the book, why are there so few Spanish words? My rough math tells me that 6% of this bilingual playtime adventure book is in a different language other than English. For a book that retails for $18.99 you’ll be able hire a Spanish tutor to play with your child for 45 minutes. Alternatively, you can purchase a book that has dozens upon dozens more words in the language that you’d like for them to learn and does it with just as much fun, but not as much brand name.
For us, it’s like advertising an early illustrated book for kids that love dinosaurs and then having a human talk to them about the big lizards for 94% of the book.
Secondarily, the book is written by Jimmy Fallon and Jennifer Lopez. If you were to say that Lopez wrote the words in Spanish and Fallon the English words that’s a 94/6 split, but co-collaborators probably don’t work like that. This is where the negative bias in me rears its head like a three-day-old whitehead that’s sensitive to the touch. It’s the kind where you can feel it pulsing, just begging for attention, but you know that it’ll go away on its own, kind of like bad advertising.
In the end, Con Pollo is a book that might attract some parents who are Fallon or Lopez fans, but that’s the extent of it. There’s not enough Spanish in the book to legitimately call it a bilingual adventure. Certainly, there are some Spanish words, but if the goal of your book buck is to teach young children a second language then your time will be spent better elsewhere.
Con Pollo, A Bilingual Playtime Adventure is by Jimmy Fallon and Jennifer Lopez with illustrations by Andrea Campos and is available on Feiwel and Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing.
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We love to watch The Muppets because the movies and the old television show has something that works on a level that parents, as well as, children, could enjoy at the same time. Reading, especially non-fiction reading is a different animal altogether. The reading interests of elementary school students are, for the most a common one with some touch points that boys and girls both hit upon. When boys get into fifth grade they crave all things Bigfoot, Sasquatch, UFO, Bermuda Triangle or alien porthole. All of these things combine in the Venn Diagram of The Search for Sasquatch, a non-fiction book by Laura Krantz that at first glance might not seem like it’s on par for upper elementary school students.
When is a pop-up book not a pop-up book? We love high-quality, intricate pop-up books but readily acknowledge that their complexity paired with their price point makes them an unrealistic option for younger, unsupervised audiences. An Abrams Unfolds Books is a series from Abrams Books for Young Readers that takes the pop-up elements that attract pre-k audiences and puts them in a package that’s durable and less likely to get destroyed. The Spider-Verse Unfolds is the second book in the series and visits Miles Morales, as well as, some others from his spider-centric world.
When most elementary-aged children are shown Van Dog, they won’t understand it. Heck, I’m decades older than an elementary student and I’m 100% confident that I don’t understand every inference, cultural nod, or artist’s reference in Van Dog. The obvious fact that the painting dog is certainly supposed to be a canine representation of Van Gogh, I got that one. After that, it’s up for grabs, but the one takeaway that every reader will walk away with; is that Van Gogh is a big, colorful, mostly-wordless, illustrated book that’s loaded with infectious energy.
We’ve read a couple of age-appropriate scary books lately. And while we enjoyed them to an extent they all felt like it was paying homage to something else, now here’s the interesting part. We have never read a Goosebumps book. The series came on the scene too late for us to read as its intended audience and since a new one hasn’t popped up on our radar, they’re Greek to us. Stinetinglers is from R.L. Stine and sparkles the way that I imagine some people view his more well-known publications.
Somewhere between John Hughes, Aztec Camera, a business/self-help book and The Tao of Pooh lies Raised on the 80s. 30+ Unexpected Life Lessons is the main subtitle to the book and when you combine the two of them it provides a nice overview of the book. The family and I are going through the classic 80’s movies now, some of them we’ve seen before and others are being viewed for the first time. Raised on the 80s is a comprehensive look as movies, music, and culture that happened in the 80s, combining real-life stories from Chris Clews, and then give it some gas to make it relevant to today’s culture.
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