This book celebrates the often humorous ways in which cats worm their way into our hearts. Flossie isn’t killing birds and catching fish. Rather, she has a hobby of “bird watching” and “fishing.”
Tag: picture books
Blizzard at the Zoo
This unassuming picture book by Robert Bahr is excellent. Written in 1982, it has the quality of an older science reader-type book but it captures the more modern event of the 1977 blizzard at the Buffalo Zoo in New York.
Noah’s Ark
Spier kept the illustration full of whimsy and still very suggestive of real things. Two things struck me while I enjoyed Noah’s Ark…
Lucy Maud and the Cavendish Cat
Lovers of Anne of Green Gables and other Lucy Maud Montgomery stories will not want to miss Lucy Maud and the Cavendish Cat.
Sergeant Reckless
When the time came for real fighting, Pvt. Reckless proved herself to be incredibly loyal and brave. Despite being hit above the eye and in her left flank with pieces of shrapnel, she made fifty-one trips up to the cannon, going a distance of thirty-five miles up and down steep terrain fully loaded, and carrying nine thousand pounds of ammunition. The impressive little mare helped to change the entire course of the war.
The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles
He loves his job because getting the letters so often makes people happy, but his wish is that someday a letter will be for him. This is unlikely because he has no friends. His loneliness is exemplified by the bleakness of the illustrations through about half the book.
Ain’t Nothing but a Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry
I remember singing some version of “The Ballad of John Henry” when I was in grade school, but I don’t remember anyone explaining what it meant. Since we learned it along with silly songs like “Froggy Went a-Courtin’” and “Señor Don Gato,” it didn’t occur to me to wonder if John Henry had been a…
Swirl by Swirl and Blockhead
One regular feature that Biblioguides posts on social media is called Bookalikes. Their team highlights two books that are related and complementary in some way. What interested me about the pairing of Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature by Joyce Sidman with Blockhead: the Life of Fibonacci by Joseph D’Agnese was that they looked like…
Waiting for the Biblioburro
On a hill behind a tree, there is a house. In the house, there is a bed and on the bed there is a little girl named Ana, fast asleep, dreaming about the world outside and beyond the hill. Ana has to help her father and mother with the farm work. When it’s hot outside,…
Bill Peet
As my reviews will indicate, I think Kermit the Hermit is a gem worth searching out. I think The Ant and the Elephant has a certain charm. And I think Big Bad Bruce has some things that are worth noting.
Dahlia
A Plumfield Kids book review by Greta Masarik, age 13: Unlike some picture books about dolls, Dahlia is different. Where most books take the point of view of a girl who loves dolls, this book is from the point of view of a girl who strongly dislikes them.
A House Is a House for Me
I’m teaching literature this year in a program for homeschool kids. The most challenging group is the fourteen six-and-seven-year-olds. Reading levels in the group are so varied that I’m focusing on excellent picture books, and they are loving it. More than half of these kids were in last year’s five-year-old class, so I can’t rerun…
The “Small” and “Little” Books by Lois Lenski
These books by Lois Lenski are for your youngest listeners. Children will be drawn into the delight of words as they associate them with everyday activities.
Pharaoh’s Boat
In September, we interviewed David Weitzman about this and others of his marvelous books. You can listen to that interview here. I seem to have vague memories of my brother James loving famed author and illustrator David Macaulay when we were growing up. Since my oldest was a baby, he has reminded me of James…
Little Old Bear
“Once upon a time there was a little old Teddy bear. He was so old that he had lost his fur and his eyes and he was not the handsome little bear he had once been. “The children he had played with had grown up and gone away, and so he lay in a dusty…