Children's book reviews, all age comic books, Kidlit, mglit, movies, entertainment and parenting
My pseudo-critical thinking lessons to high school students sometimes challenge them. I do provide answers, but I prefer to have students find the path or the solution, themselves. Jokes, stories and raw enthusiasm can lead people to learn in a manner where they want to, as opposed to they have to. Mushrooms and Company takes the former road. Educators, parents and some students will recognize the look of Mushrooms and Company.
If Daddy Mojo did an annual top 10 list, To Activate Space Portal, Lift Here would be in that list. It’s a picture book that practically reads itself. The book’s cover reels in older audiences, as well as, those sophisticated folks who appreciate Bat Boy and his origin. Bat Boy was on the cover of Weekly World News in 1992. He was a boy who resembled a bat and was found in a West Virginia cave. The cover of To Activate Space Portal, Lift Here has a more scientific, glossier, STEM-centric appeal for the most part, but then has a giant star on it inviting people to “Be the FIRST to meet alien life-forms!”. It’s that bit of over-the-top cheese that sold WWN and helps sells To Activate Space Portal, Lift Here.
Have you seen Inside Out or Inside Out 2? Both of those movies did a fabulous job in explaining emotions. They were especially effective with those complicated ones, like anxiety and jealousy. The Gland Factory: A Tour of Your Body’s Goops, Juices and Hormones is the literary sibling by another mother to those movies. This is a book that’s funny, legitimately LOL funny on so many levels that you’ll begrudgingly find yourself learning something in-between a chuckle, grin, guffaw or laugh. Author Rachel Poliquin proves that she knows her audience because The Gland Factory is sufficiently gross enough to attract upper-elementary through middle school readers.
The intersection of picture and illustration book is a tricky one that only publishing executives know how to successfully navigate 100% of the time. Bud Finds Her Gift is a lovely book that could be seen in either one of those categories by some people. Does the text do more of the heavy lifting or it that left up to the illustrations? The answer to that question determines if it would be classed as an illustrated book or a picture book. Granted, as the end of the day, other than the author, illustrator, and publisher, who really cares? It’s when you trip over a book like Bud Finds Her Gift that you want to describe it accurately.
The educator wonk in me loves books that aren’t scared to display their intelligence. The realist in me knows something that’s too smart will scare off some readers. The second book in the Extraordinary Animals series is Calculating Chimpanzees, Brainy Bees, and Other Animals with Mind-Blowing Mathematical Abilities. That’s a mouthful of a title and it has the intellect to back up. Not that a reference, non-fiction book aimed at elementary school readers has a beef with anybody, other than ignorance.
Back in my day board books were just about caterpillars, shapes and colors. Babies, crawlers and toddlers have it so good today. Night Night Tyrannosaurus and Night Night Ladybug are board books that swim with today’s books for young demographics. Tyrannosaurus and Ladybug each have a different focus, with one being on shapes and the other on colors. It has the mandatory aspects of education, but wraps it in the pleasantries of dinosaurs or insects. My four-year-old self describes this as a win/win when it comes to board books.
If you were paying attention, we learned (or were reminded) that birds are descendants of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs Can Be Small is an illustrated book that dinosaur kids need. Those hard dinosaur kids, like the younger brother in Mitchell Vs. The Machines, that kid. If your child or students salivate at the thought of reading or having read to them, descriptions of giant lizards who died out so that the smallest of their brethren could survive, this is for you. This illustrated book sets up the smaller, lesser-known versions by introducing their more well-known, larger versions first. The result is a very curious dinosaur book that will entice dino-kids who think they know it all because they saw Jurassic Park for the dinosaur facts, and not the fact that they run amuck.
There’s something about the cover to Little Mouse’s Encyclopedia: A Picture Book About The Wonders of Nature that perfectly translates how easily the book can cross over to different ages and cultures. It’s from the perspective of a little mouse, albeit a very intelligent one, who is exploring the things around her burrow. All the while a narrator is providing some expository comments as to why she’s doing things, in addition to offering smarter-than-expected facts about the flora and fauna that the mouse encounters on daily basis.
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