Provo Library Children's Book Blog

Archie Albright is a typical 10-year-old boy living in East London. For his birthday he receives a blank scrapbook from his uncle who lives in the country. Initially he uses it as a place to write down his random thoughts, draw his comic strips and keep his various little boy treasures (cat teeth, beetles and toe fluff). The war quickly creeps in and becomes the focal point of the entire scrapbook. Archie creates new comic characters representing various members of his family and their political viewpoints. He includes letters from relatives fighting on the front, newspaper articles, maps and other war-related memorabilia instead of bugs and teeth. It is amazing how much can be learned about a person (real or fictitious) by reading their scrapbook. Not only do they include their personal thoughts and reactions to everything around them, but they can share a lot about their personality by the pictures and objects they include. Archie's War gives the reader insight into what it must...

If you have a little girl who has already read the Fairy Realm books and the Daisy Meadows books, here is a fun new fairy series that they will love. The Fairy House is an attractively presented series. They are small hardbacks, with colorful, sparkly covers. The actual books even have little flower petal skirts glued on the covers for a cute three dimensional affect. Katie and her mother just moved to a new house. To thank Katie for being such a good helper during the process her mother buys her a dollhouse. Katie is ecstatic and can't wait to start decorating it. She decides to take the dollhouse outside to work on. There is a huge old oak tree in a neighboring field where sets up her craft supplies for her project. She gets distracted and leaves the dollhouse there overnight. Little does she know that the oak tree is a portal between earth and the fairy kingdom. Four fairies arrive and move into her dollhouse. They are on a mission of extreme importance: to save the oak tree fro...

A story about thinking outside the box, this lovely book is about a young girl named Emma who tries the age-old trick of counting sheep in order to fall asleep. She thinks counting 10 will do the trick, but to her amazement, she makes it to 108! Strangely enough, the poor 108th sheep has some personal trials that hinder the counting process, but little Emma comes up with a creative solution that solves everyone's problems. This book was a delightful read. The story is charming and the graphite and watercolor illustrations are wistful, delicate, and beautiful--they complement each other perfectly. Ayano Imai's line quality is delicious over the creamy ribbed paper. Read this book and take a new look at how to count sheep.

A new intermediate chapter book series for little girls who like magic and adventure, Little Genie is sure to be a hit. Ali and her grandma love to browse at flea markets and garage sales. Usually Ali is quite embarrassed by her grandmother's junky finds. That all changes when they find an original lava lamp from the 1960's! Ali takes it home and starts to give it a good cleaning. To her great surprise a tiny girl pops out in a pink cloud of smoke. Ali soon begins making her wishes, which is much harder than it sounds. There are many rules involved in wish-making and the results are not always what Ali wants. If only Little Genie had not been expelled from genie school then maybe her spells would not cause so many problems.

“I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly DO BOTH,” says President Theodore Roosevelt of his daughter Alice. After reading this gorgeous picture book biography I can understand why. Alice Roosevelt was not the kind of well behave girl you’d suppose a president’s daughter should be. She was more the kind of girl who danced all night, owned a snake named Emily Spinach (named after a rather thin aunt) and joined an all-boys club under her father’s very nose by having the boys dress up like girls whenever they held meetings at her house. Alice was also known to jump into a swimming pool fully clothed and created a group called the Night Riders—but if you want to know what kind of mischief THEY got up too you’ll have to read the book and find out! The beautiful classic looking pictures are as colorful as Alice herself. (My favorite is the one where Alice lays face down on her bed, her head under a pillow, surrounded by dozens of used handkerchiefs.)...

Scott Morse first created Magic Pickle as a graphic novel (to be re-released in May). These two beginning chapter books are a perfect choice for reluctant readers. They are filled with fun black and white illustrations and a hilarious short story. Underneath the floor in Jo Jo's bedroom is a secret laboratory where the Magic Pickle was accidentally created along with the Brotherhood of Evil Produce! Now Magic Pickle uses the lab as his headquarters while he hunts down and rids the world of all the evil fruits and vegetables (and eggs) that are wreaking havoc everywhere. Magic Pickle and the Planet of the Grapes and Magic Pickle vs. the Egg Poacher will likely be most appealing to boys. However, if girls give them a try they will probably enjoy them as well. After all, the main human character is a girl who has to keep the Magic Pickle's existence a secret and help him whenever possible. In return he might even use his super pickle power to clean her bedroom!

CLARABELLE: MAKING MILK AND SO MUCH MORE ; Cris Peterson and David R. Lundquist; Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press, 2007; unpaged. Non-fiction. Clarabelle is one of 1200 cows who live on the Heer family's Norswiss Farm in Wisconsin. Clarabelle's statistics, multiplied by 12, are mind boggling: she eats 7 tons of feed per year; she gives enough milk each day to juice up 60 bowls of cereal; her manure is used to create electricity, fertilizer, and bedding for her own stall; she weighs as much as a soccer team worth of second graders with a coach or two thrown in; and, she gives birth to replenish the farm's supply of calves. Sam and Josh, two young farm boys, wander through David Lundquist's fine photographs, to give young readers a sense of scale, and Cris Peterson takes care to describe the farm's operations in terms that young city dwellers can understand. Clarabelle is a 2007 Orbis Pictus honor book (for distinguished non-fiction for children).

Part graphic novel part intermediate chapter book, the Fred & Anthony series should be quite popular with young boys. Fred & Anthony are best friends who spend all their time sitting on the couch watching horror movies and eating Chex Mix (Anthony) and Pez (Fred). They never do their chores because they are always paying someone else to work for them. This works well until they run out of money. Now they must find a way to make more money so they can keep paying their siblings and the neighborhood pushovers. Their initial idea is to write a book and become rich as the Queen of England (like that J.K. Rowling person). When they stumble upon a WRITER’S BLOCK, they decide to help the elderly people in their neighborhood. Unfortunately all the locals know they are slackers and undependable thus causing Fred & Anthony to head to “The Outskirts” of town looking for clients. They enter a true haunted house and their adventure begins. Full of gross things that boys love and fun co...

MY NAME IS GABITO: THE LIFE OF GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ ; Monica Brown and Raul Colon; Flagstaff, AZ: Rising Moon Press, 2007; unpaged. Biography Young children are unlikely to be familiar with Nobel prize winner Garcia Marquez's richly textured (an understatement) works of magical realism, but this book will still be a charming introduction to the power and beauty of imagination and the roots of art. (Plus, it could help grownups figure out where Garcia-Marquez's stunning prose comes from.) Raul Colon's pictures are both muted and colorful, filled with tropical light. Winner of the 2008 Pura Belpre Award for illustration, a prize well-deserved.

This is a fantastic book for any reader who wants to know what the Canterbury Tales are all about but doesn’t want to read 500 pages to figure it out. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales retold and illustrated by Marcia Williams is a great book to accomplish this. The format is very similar to a comic book format with small pictures and headings at the bottom of each picture. The different tales are approximately four pages long and are very quick and entertaining. There are stories about two cousins fighting over the same beautiful girl, men trying to kill death, a knight who must find out what a woman truly wants in a year to save his life, magicians and trickery; to name a few. However, there are some things in the stories that some may consider crude such as farting, characters sticking their bums out the window and infidelity. Even considering these few details, it is definitely a book worth reading.

The girl who lives in the castle, which is located in a museum, is lonely. Children visiting the museum can see her in the castle if they look very closely. The castle is a strangely beautiful place, full of music, toys, and fun things to do. But loneliness overrides all of these joys. The ethereal and creamy faces of the museum children match those of the dolls, which adds to the overall surreal and dreamlike quality. Included in the end is a interactive activity which will solve the loneliness problem and compel the reader to return to this magical world over and over again.

EMMA-JEAN LAZARUS FELL OUT OF A TREE ; Lauren Tarshis; New York: Dial, 2007; 199 pgs. Fiction Emma-Jean Lazarus is a Spock-like young lady who relies on logic to make her way through the world. We know this because she speaks without using contractions and she takes everything literally: when she finds Colleen Pomerantz crying in the bathroom because she has been stiffed out of her annual ski trip by the bossy Laura Gilroy, she offers to help and then tricks LG into staying home. This is a sweet little book painted in broad strokes about a girl who not only takes after her logical and somewhat standoffish father, but who shuts down her emotions almost entirely after his death. Emma-Jean Lazarus . . . is about friendship, peer pressure, good-hearted young girls, and tough cookies, and a young lady who makes a conscious decision to come back to life (she is well-named). This book is also welcome for its positive portrayal of religion--one of the book's best characters is a wise and ...

On New Year's Day, a family receives a penguin in the mail. The next day they receive another one. The special deliveries continue throughout the entire year. During this time the family struggles with many issues such as what to feed the penguins, where to keep the penguins, will the penguins ever stop arriving, and who could be sending them these animals? Mother says this kind of joke reminds her of someone, but she can't think who. 365 Penguins is an over-sized picture book that not only tells a humerous story, but informs the reader about penguins while also teaching multiplication principles.

REVOLUTION IS NOT A DINNER PARTY ; Ying Chang Compestine; New York: Henry Holt, 2007, 248 pages. Fiction The title for Ms. Compestine's first novel for children is taken from a quote by Chairman Mao: "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." And, in fact, all the niceties of civilized life are done away in China under Mao, as we learn in this new book based on Ms. Compestine's own experiences as a young girl in China. For middle-grade school children, this may be a mystifying story--why would Ling's father, a skilled surgeon, be taken from the operating theater and forced to work as a night janitor? Why should Ling's neighbors and friends be jailed because they have read books from England or America? Wh...

The 25th anniversary edition of this immigrant tale is made new and fresh with the quirky, colorful illustrations of Boris Kulikov. Grandchild Julie sits with a ball of yarn on her lap as she listens to "yarns" told by her grandpa of their immigration from Russia. Grandma is connected with the yarn as she knits and keeps her grandaughter grounded in truth. "Enough is enough, from now on I insist that Julie hears only the truth." Grandpa stands between them as he spins the yarns taller and more fantastical....stories of castles so tall the pigeons couldn't fly to the roof, large buttons, and meetings with President Theodore Roosevelt. Finally Grandpa promises that the truth will be all that passses through his lips. The promise doesn't last as he whispers "Did I ever tell you about the time Moishe the goat and I sang for President Wilson?" All in all the yarns spun are full of love and courage as the Jewish newcomers struggle to make their way, ra...

A thin blue book, Feathers is full of a variety of themes ranging from a new boy at school, dealing with a deaf brother, a mother who has experienced frequent miscarriages, discrimination and judging of those living on the other side of town. Viewed from Frannie's eyes the world is full of unanswered questions but also a place of hope. Inspired by Emily Dickenson's poem "hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul," Frannie "loved the sound of the poem,loved the way the words seemed to float across my notebook." She concludes that although there are no easy answers there is still alot of hope and that even "each moment is a thing with feathers." Feathers was recently granted the 2008 Newbery Honor Award.

I laughed out loud when I read this book the first time! I can't decide which I like better: the story or the illustrations. Maybe the story . . . a farmer, who has lost everything in a twister, is determined to make the most of the heap of scrap metal left behind. A cynical comment from a neighbor, "when pigs fly", gives him a brilliant idea. Within Mechanimals limited amount of text, 1-2 sentences or phrases per page, Tougas is able to present a problem, resolve, solution, and a happy ending. No, wait, maybe it's the illustrations . . . presented in scrapbooking style, the farmer, animals, and the "mechanimals" come to life and seem as warm and cuddly as any real cow, pig, chicken, or horse. My LOL came on the page where we see the chick-bots working hard, except for the one showing off his muscles. The lube and fueling cow-bot is also a real tickler. Tougas' watercolors, set against soft, pencil backgounds, are so enjoyable to look at. After you read...

SMASH! CRASH! Jon Scieszka; New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007; unpaged. If you are looking for a book to rile your little boys up more than they already are, Smash! Crash! is for you. Jack and Dan are two trucks who love nothing better than tooling around Trucktown all day crashing into hard-working trucks who are trying to do their jobs: Melvin the Cement Mixer and Monster Truck Max, for example. In the end their destructive tendencies are harnessed for good by Wrecking Crane Rosie who needs some help tearing down an old building. Jack and Dan, Melvin, Max, and Rosie, as well as all the rest of Trucktown, are brightly colored and painted in bold strokes (by David Shannon, Loren Long, and David Gordon) to appeal to all those little dudes who can't wait for the tower of blocks to be built so they can smack it down. Although I like a ripsnorting, guy-oriented picture book as well as the next person, as an old boring slow-moving vehicle myself, I found Jack Truck and Dump Truck Dan...

This book will catch the eye of many a child because of the shiny, metallic gold fish scales on the cover. They might also enjoy looking through the book because Stanley, shiny and sparkly, is on every page. Unfortunately, that's about all Bright Stanley has to offer. The story is weak and, at times, doesn't even make sense. For example, it starts out with Stanley waking up late and inadvertently being left behind by his "school" as they all swim off to "cooler waters for the summer". Why didn't they just wake him up with everyone else? And doesn't he know the way? In the end, when they do meet up, his friends say "We've been looking all over for you!" Well, guys, he was home in bed. The writing appears to be in rough draft form, that stage before a good editor has taken a look at it. The dialogue between Stanley and a lobster he encounters is clumsy. There's no flow to the text. It would not make a good read-aloud, so sa...

BIRMINGHAM, 1963 ; Carole Boston Weatherford; Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, 2007; 39 pgs. Nonfiction. Of all the tragic events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s, none was harder to bear than the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church which killed four young girls. Ms. Weatherford retells this often told story (see The Watsons go to Birmingham , by Christopher Paul Curtis) with stark economy through the eyes of a young girl who was in church, but didn't follow the older girls into the bathroom because she didn't think they would want her there. Black and white pictures of the time are juxtaposed with blood-red graphics, and the homely artifacts of the girls' lives--birthday candles, a single shoe, a game of jacks--deepen the sorrow. Birmingham, 1963 is an excellent book for explaining the gains and sorrows of the day, when America began her painful shift toward equality and justice for all.

ANIMAL POEMS ; Valerie Worth, illustrated by Steve Jenkins; New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007; unpaged. Nonfiction. Many children's books are written in verse or rhyme; Ms. Worth's Animal Poems are truly poetry. Consider the porcupine "Held fast/ In the thicket/ Of its own/ Thorns, the/Porcupine's Timid body/ Blooms safe . . . " or my favorite, the bear, whose fur is gentle " . . . but his eye is not . . ." his "Hot eye/ Stings out/ From the dark hive/ Of his head/ Like a fierce/ Furious/ Bee." Any author would be hard pressed to create text equal to or greater than Steve Jenkins' extraordinary paper-cut illustrations, but Valerie Worth has succeeded beyond telling. Ms. Worth's recent death makes this her last book, alas.

HOW STRONG IS IT? A MIGHTY BOOK ALL ABOUT STRENGTH ; Ben Hillman; New York: Scholastic, 2008. 48 pages. Nonfiction Hillman's book is just the sort of Guinness World Record kind of thing that kids love. How strong is a spiderweb?--if spun to scale, a spiderweb could stop a Boeing 747 traveling at 555 miles per hour in midflight. Most wood has a greater tensile strength than steel, and if you wanted to balance your house on a single post of black locust wood, it would hold. Three-quarter page graphics illustrate the power of nature and of man-made objects: how many horses to drive the world's most powerful sports car (the Bugatti Veyron)? How much fuel to power the Saturn V rocket? (An Olympic-size swimming pool full every three minutes). How Strong Is It? is one of those rare books that could lure a young child away from the computer and into a whole world of exploration. Highly recommended.

It’s rare to find a book about running a lemonade stand. It’s even rarer to find a lemonade stand story that is humorous, entertaining, touching and educational all rolled in one. The Lemonade War is all of those things and more. Evan and his precocious younger sister, Jessie, have always been good friends. All that changes, however, when Jessie skips a grade and ends up being put in Evan’s class at school. Feelings run high and soon a war breaks out between the siblings. A lemonade stand war. The winner takes all and the loser, well—you’ll have to read the story to find out. The story itself is fabulous, but T he Lemonade War is so much more than just a story. I loved the way the chapters alternate between the two characters, showing completely opposite points of view of each incident that happens. The reader can understand why each person is doing the things they do even if the other character’s in the book can’t. This story would make great discussions for book clubs. The Lemonad...

WHERE IN THE WILD? CAMOUFLAGED CREATURES CONCEALED . . . AND REVEALED ; text by David M. Schwartz and Yael Schy; photographs by Dwight Kuhn; Berkeley: Tricycle Press, 2007, unpaged. Non-Fiction Using a deft combination of riddles, puzzles, and informative text, the creators of Where in the Wild ? have produced a delightfully interactive book for children. On the left-hand page of each spread, a riddle in rhyme invites the children to guess what animal might be cleverly concealed on the right-hand page in Kuhn's photographs. Some are relatively easy to spot: the fawns in a field of flowers, for instance, or even the wolf. Some require a long stare and a re-reading of the clues in the poem. If you find yourself stumped, or just wanting to verify your guess, lift the flap on the page to see what animal, insect, fish, or egg is lurking nearly unseen, and to discover interesting facts about the creatures themselves. First-rate.

The lovable character of Fancy Nancy (from Jane O'Connor's popular picture books) is the latest star in the I Can Read beginning reader series. In "Fancy Nancy and the Boy from Paris" a new boy comes to Fancy Nancy's school. He is introduced as the new boy from Paris. Immediately Nancy is interested! She loves anything fancy and french. She invites him over to her house to play soccer. True to the Fancy Nancy picture book formate, the reader is inadvertantly introduced to some new fancy words: three french words and four english words to be exact. A fun twist at the end reveals where the new boy is REALLY from. Despite the pink and glitter, both boys and girls will enjoy this book.

Usually I avoid books with pink covers, especially if it also has a peppy-looking, tiara-wearing cheerleader on it. However, as a fan of Betty G. Birney, I decided to look past the cover and give The Princess and the Peabodys a chance. I am so glad I did. This was a very entertaining book that had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion. Casey Peabody and her grandmother regularly go to garage and estate sales looking for treasure. They got more than they bargained for one Saturday morning when they bought an old rusted-shut box. The box was much heavier than it appeared and their dog Duke was frightened of it. When Casey's father finally managed to open it, out stepped Princess Eglantine, soon to be known as Egg. She has spent over 700 years trapped in the box thanks to her bungling court wizard, Alaric. Now she has to adapt to life in the 21st century while Alaric, who has traveled through time, tries to find the correct spell to send her home. Obviously Casey is not thri...

Nic Bishop Spiders is a fascinating book about spiders. The photographs of the spiders are amazing. There are close up pictures that show every detail of the spider from their hairy legs, the color of their eyes and their hatching babies. This book isn’t for the weak though because the pictures are also quite disgusting. The text is also interesting and gives a brief description of the spiders attributes and hunting styles. This is a must read book for anyone who is interested in learning about spiders.