Moo Knows Numbers by Kerry McQuaide

Rating: WORTHY!

I've been in love with Midge and Moo since I reviewed Lost in the Garden and A Day With Moo back in February 2016. In this one - another in a series of 'adventures', Moo helps children count from one through ten which is really easy route to find if you can just put your finger on it....

The illustrations are, as usual, adorable, and Moo's indispensable presence helps keep thing moo-ving. This is very much his book, starting right with number 1, the one and only Moo! there's color and action, and the pictures look great and the text is readily readable on my smart phone, so it will always be there to entertain your child even if the tablet is left at home. The print book is probably sweet, too, but I haven't seen it. If you're looking for a simple counting book for a young child, you can't do better than this one, especially int he adorability stakes (or steaks, if you want to get technical about Moo...).

My Book of Feelings by Tracey Ross

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher! Note also not to confuse this one with My Book of Feelings by Desiree Kelley, which is evidently a book of poetry but which I have not read.

Here's a useful book for young children to have. The author explores and discusses what feelings are and how they might feel inside (fluffy or sharp), and what to do about them. I read this in the Adobe Digital Additions on a desktop computer, where it made me feel fluffy, and both on my smart phone and on an iPad. In both of those cases I used Amazon's crappy Kindle app and the book looked awful. My feelings about that were very sharp!

I haven't seen it as a Nook book, but my gut feeling about that is that it would be a lot better than what Kindle can do. But in absence of any real knowledge of that, I'd recommend buying this one as a print book to be safe. This kind of book is definitely not designed with the e-world in mind; they're designed for print, let's face it, and because of certain features in this particular one, a print book seems like the best way to go even if it's more expensive. Read on for more details!

The author begins by discussing what kinds of feelings you might have, and explains how you might get to feel that way. She also discusses the fact that you might have these feelings and not quite know why, or that you might have several mixed feelings. She then goes on to talk about what you might do to let feelings out in non-harmful ways. There's also lots of space to write down your own feelings and draw yourself experiencing them! That might be a bit hard on a tablet computer (unless your kid is unsupervised and has access to a Sharpie...), but in a print book it would be useful, and might even help a child to deal with those sharp feelings, too! I loved this book. It's a great idea, a useful tool, and is really good to look at except on the Kindle app!

Dojo Surprise by Chris Tougas

Rating: WORTHY!

This story was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher, and it's a little bit weird and off the beaten track, which is a good thing. I think that's why it appealed to me. it;s also part of a series of "Dojo" books, and I have to warn you that it did not look at all good on a smart phone, so you definitely want to read it on something else.

The kids of the Dojo Daycare want to throw a surprise birthday party for their rather nervous sensei, and their sneaking around does little for his mental health, but they succeed in creating the surprise using hard-won ninja techniques, and in the end have a great birthday party, and a much relieved sensei! I think it's fun and playful and very colorful, but be warned: it might put sneaky ninja ideas into young children's brains!

Abigail the Whale by Davide Cali

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a wonderful book which takes a positive-thinking approach to bullying. You can't control what other people do (although you can influence it for better or for worse!), but you can control how you see what they do and how you let it affect you.

Abigail is overweight and she loves swimming, and there, at the crux of these two contentions, is her problem: people make fun of her at the pool, and call her Abigail the Whale. She makes a big splash and it's not seen in a positive light by her classmates. I was tempted to wonder why the teacher didn't berate her classmates for their bullying and their mean 'fun-making', especially given that he's the one who turns around and introduces her to positive thinking, but I doubt young kids will be quite that analytical! It would have been nice had he said something to the other kids, though.

But this is about Abigail's problem, not the teacher's, and Abigail is smart and considers this new addition to her armory seriously. Once she tries it out and finds that it works, she embraces it whole-heartedly and starts to enjoy life again, and not just at the pool. I liked the way this book offered something for the child to do, and a way to think positively about herself. It's very simplified here, but maybe this will sow a seed or two which will grow, flourish, and blossom strongly later in children's lives. I love the illustrations by Sonja Bougaeva, and the book's overall tone.

I Am Josephine (and I Am a Living Thing) by Jan Thornhill

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

"Inspired by science and nature writer Jan Thornhill's many classroom visits, this book is intended to help children recognize themselves as part of the natural world, with an emphasis on how all living things share similarities."

This was a great book which teaches a little taxonomy along with exhibiting a fun young girl who is the very embodiment of life. Josephine compares and contrasts herself with everything around her. Is she like this or different from that? In her comparisons and contrasts, we learn that she's a living thing (and definitely full of life!), and an animal, and a mammal, and a human being. We also learn what some other animals and plants are, as she skips and dances through her colorful world examining everything. The book is a joy to read and a delight to look at, and is educational to boot, with some interaction where young kids can search and count. All in all it's a great little book and I liked it very much.

Baba Yaga by An Leysen

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a familiar story since I read one similar to it not all that long ago. It's rooted in Slavic mythology and makes for a bit of a dire read for younger children given the threat of being eaten by a witch, though this isn't very different from quite a few of the better known and perhaps more beloved fairy tales, but it is worth keeping in mind when considering reading it to impressionable youngsters. On the up-side, it presents a tale of a self-possessed and brave girl who does what she has to, and wins out in the end.

It's a gorgeously illustrated book about this evil witch who flies around in a cauldron, eats little children, and lives in a cottage in the forest which sits on two chicken legs. The story was well written, and even when I was tempted to raise the issue of a man bereft of his wife being called a widow, which is the female form, rather than a widower, I realized that this is the very thing I rail against myself: why do men get to be called actors, that is, those who do the acting, but women are dismissed as actresses, which sounds more like something you sleep on? There are many genderist words like that, so I say, go for it! Widow it is!

The problem with this widow, though, is that he's been enchanted by Baba Yaga's sister who lures him into marrying her, and who holds him so entranced that he doesn't even see how abusive she is to his daughter who he loves and dotes on - or did. Olga's dad (mom isn't on the scene here, not in person, anyway!) falls in love under her spell, but his new wife doesn't want any step-children around. Why she didn't simply pick a guy who had no children goes unexplained, but the upshot of it is that she really doesn't like Olga's positive attitude and so sends her off to borrow a needle and thread from Baba Yaga, knowing that the child will be eaten, and she'll never have to be concerned with the little brat again.

What she doesn't know is that mom's love for Olga was so powerful that, like in the Harry Potter stories, it left behind a protection for her in the form of a nesting doll which mom bequeathed her daughter. This doll offers advice which might not seem valid at the time it's given, but which proves to be very useful when the right time comes. This doll is not about to let this child be eaten, and so with advice and guidance offered in this manner, Olga is able to survive and overcome the power of the evil stepmom.

Like I said, the story is a bit dire, but for feisty children of strong constitution, this tale will stir them to be confident and not fearful, and to be brave and resourceful. Hopefully! I liked it and I recommend it. Besides, the artwork is wonderful!

The Tale of Peter Rabbit By Beatrix Potter

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an unexpected delight. Peter Rabbit is the naughtiest rabbit ever - and naughty is precisely the correct term for him. He's off adventuring when he should be gathering berries with his sisters; he's getting into trouble with the local farmer; he's almost getting himself caught; and he's ending his day by losing all of his nice new clothes!

First published in 1902, this story has every ounce of quaint still clinging to it like a scent of pot-pourri, and it's not your modern bleached fairy tale either. It's also a best seller, having sold over a hundred fifty million copies, which isn't too shabby given that it started as nothing more than an illustrated letter aimed at cheering up the sick son of a friend. Based on an actual pet rabbit which Potter owned, and illustrated by the author quite charmingly, this tale is well worth a few minutes of any child's time - no matter how old the child is!

Tigers for Kids by Kim Chase, John Davidson

Rating: WARTY!

This book was a free special on Barnes and Noble, and I can see why. It was not very well written and rather sloppily edited in places. It read more like fan-fiction than any serious attempt to interest young children in tigers. A lot of it was repetitive and felt, at least, like it had been taken from some online source and the rest made-up. A lot of it actually read like it was a middle-grade essay. It was free, so you can't complain too much, but caveat emptor! Or in this case, cave-cat emptor?!

While the book gets a lot right, it's also a fount of misinformation. For example, on page 7 (the page number on my tablet in the Nook reader - the book itself has no page numbers), we're told the modern tiger is a descendant of the "saber tooth tiger" but that's not true. Tigers and their closest relatives, snow leopards, broke away from other cat species some three million years ago and are not closely-related to saber-toothed cats (not tigers!) at all - no modern cat is.

One of the things the introduction promises, is to explain why tigers have stripes, and it comes up with the obvious answer that tigers are better camouflaged with stripes than if they were all orange or all black or white. What this book doesn't tell you is that the basic reason for the coloration is that the tiger's skin is that color! If a tiger were shaved, it would not look as pretty, but it would still have the same stripes, and probably would be a lot cooler in the daytime heat!

But the thing which isn't addressed at all is that the tiger tends to be a crepuscular and nocturnal hunter, plus, it sees prey and prey sees it in ways it is hard for us to imagine with our sight, so the tiger's camouflage and hunting habits have to be pictured in a world of poorer daytime vision, better nighttime vision (be it greyscale), and a world inhabited by odors which we cannot even begin to imagine with our amateur and dysfunctional noses!

It's not true to say the tiger can see as well as a human during daytime. It can see as well as it needs to, but it doesn't have the acuity humans have for the simple reason it never evolved in tigers: it wasn't necessary for them to be able to conduct their business, which is hunting, and which is conducted at twilight or at night. During those times of day the tiger can capture six times more light (not "six time greater" as the book has it) than humans because they have six times the number of receptor rods in their retinas - just like your domestic cat does. They also have, like a domestic cat, a tapetum lucidum - essentially a mirror behind the retina which reflects light back onto the retina so they can 'double-dip' as it were. The cost of this is that they have poorer daylight vision - both domestic cats and tigers - and see color poorly if at all as compared with humans.

The "six time greater" spelling/grammar error is repeated in other places in the book in different ways, such as when I read on page 15 that "their black strips...hide them", when it should clearly have read 'black stripes'. There are awkward constructions such as "One form of verbal communication used by tigers is roaring. Other tigers from as far away as two miles can hear the roaring of other tigers." Another instance was "It is not uncommon for there to be a dominant or leader among the cubs."

Contrary to what the book tells us, that "Our current day tigers evolved into a subspecies that existed 25 million years ago," modern tigers have existed for less than two million years. About three million years ago they existed only as an ancestor species that eventually split into snow leopards on the one hand and tigers on the other, so I have no idea where the '25 million' figure comes from, and the book offers no references whatsoever to check.

In conclusion, if your kids absolutely adore tigers and can't get enough of them, and you can get this book free, then go for it, but I can't in good faith recommend it as a useful book on the topic. You should read my other non-fiction review posted today to see how a book on animals should be done.

Malala: Activist for Girls' Education by Raphaële Frier

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

On National Wonder Woman Day I'm not going to get into the dire gender politics and hypocrisy of a UN which proclaims a woman's day whilst rejecting a bunch of female candidates for secretary general, but it seems only right we should celebrate the spirit of this day by looking at a real-life wonder woman. Back in August of 2015 I positively reviewed I am Malala, and this version of her story, aimed at a much younger audience, is a worthy read, too. It zeroes in on the facts of her life, what she did, what happened to her, and how she survived, without going into exhausting detail. The images are colorful and enticing, and bring the reader into the story, which is an important one, and a potentially tragic one which fortunately had a happy ending.

This book even looked good on a smart phone, with the images large and the text legible. It tells of Malala's early childhood, and the conditions in which she lived, which deteriorated dramatically after an earthquake that idiotic religious flakes decided was some god's wrath! You’d have to be a complete and utter moron to worship a god which is as capricious and childish as that, and you would have to be criminally fraudulent to try to argue that this god generates cruel earthquakes, but this is the kind of extremists these people are, and this is what they were promoting. They take power not because they are right, or respected, or admired, or favored by the majority, but because they can get guns and threaten people. These are no disciples of any god of love.

Malala was lucky in having a family which supported educating girls, but the Taliban fears women, and detests equality. They're not the only whack-jobs who do so. There are many nations where women are treated in this same way, although 'treated' is a bad choice of word to describe it. Not all of these nations are condemned as they should be. Some are close allies of the USA. These people have no concept of fun and relaxation, and none of equality or parity. They are control freaks and bullies who fear women garnering any sort of power for themselves, and they started bullying everyone, not just women, but women in particular. People like this are so disempowered that they can only be 'men' when they have 'their women' as the phrase goes: barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen - and uneducated in order to keep them that way. This is something my wife joked about some years ago when she was actually barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen! It’s no joke when it’s real life though.

Malala started a blog to speak out about the problems they faced, and she soon became a local spokeswoman and representative. The Tailiban were pushed back but not far enough, and when they resurged, they cracked down just as hard, and they decided that this little girl was emasculating them. They proved this to be actually true when the only response they could engender was to shoot her three times, but she proved stronger than they, and she resurged herself to become a more effective opponent of their bruitality and cluelessness than ever she had been before. This is an important story which needs to be heard, and children are never too young to start hearing about female heroes. This little book is a great start. I recommend it.

Ian at Grandma and Grandpa's House by Pauline Oud

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this is an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher!

This is the story of my trip to my grandparents' house. Kidding! But I can't not review a book about a character who shares my name right? Ian is off to the grandparents for the weekend, and he packs his favorite book and his green gingham bunny. I want a green gingham bunny! He gets to his grandparents' house, which he is thrilled to visit, and he waves a cheery goodbye to mom.

Ian gets cake as his first meal. Does mommy know this is how they feed him?! Hopefully he'll have a good solid meal later and this is just a snack treat. At any rate, he gets to run it off in the park when they take curly for a walk. I'm not sure why the short-haired dog is called curly, but let's roll with it. Maybe his tail is curly? After the enjoyable walk they come home and make soup with fresh veggies! Yes, I knew there was more to this than cake! Ian gets a bedtime story and a nice nap. This is the way I like life! I wonder how the author knew?

This was fun, cozy, easy reading and a nice bedtime tale to put the little ones to sleep with. I recommend it.

Star Light Star Bright by Anna Prokos

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher!

Illustrated nicely by Dave Clegg, this is one of an educational series for young kids. This particular volume is about planets in the solar system. Others in the series are about dinosaurs, Antarctica, volcanoes, seeds, and your own back yard!

Jackson and Wyatt wish upon a star, and find themselves in a cozy spacecraft with their dog pal and a license to explore the solar system. Starting with the baking heat of Mercury, they fly ever outwards, growing ever more chill, but learning some fun facts about each planet as they go. But don't worry, they return safely and get to bed on time!

The story is simple and straight forward, with brief interesting facts about each planet, snappy enough to command attention without overloading young brains. It's got adventure and a tiny bit of danger, and is a worthwhile read for young kinds to learn about how fascinating and alien our solar system is. There's a little index at the back, along with suggested further reading, and a short fact file. Great illustrations bring the planets home to young minds and hopefully stimulate a bit of a scientific interest for later in life.

A Gefilte Fishy Tale by Allison and Wayne Marks

Rating: WORTHY!

This might sound weird (then anyone who knows me will know this is par for the course), but a couple of days ago the term 'gefilte fish' was going through my brain. I know not from whence it came. Not on that day, but a few years back, I saw a greeting card in a store that featured 'gefilte fish' as part of a nonsense good wishes recital and I blame that for originally fixating it in my brain where it's been lodged comfortably ever since.

I know at some point - and assuming I live long enough - that it's going to come out in a story. All this, anyway, to indicate why I thought it was a good idea to read this young children's book beautifully illustrated by Renée Andriani, and rhymed to perfection by the Marks brothers, er, husband wife team! Although frankly, it might have been written by the Marx Brothers.

Bubba Judy buys a jar of gefilte fish, and all is well until they get it home and find they cannot get it open. This also turns out to be jar for the course as they resort to an assortment of friends to help undo it, and all of them fail. What's to become of it? Well you'll have an interesting time finding out. In addition to the story, you get recipe for gefilte fish mini muffins, which frankly sounds disgusting to me, but maybe they're nice. There's also an original song by Wayne Marks, Margie Blumberg, and Gavin Whelehan, and a very welcome glossary for the Yiddish-challenged, which includes me most of the time, although fans of Mel Brooks movies might recognize some of these words. I recommend this one for a fun read for kids and an educational experience!

A Fish Called Blackbeard by Gillian Rogerson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was another charming young children's/middle-grade book from an author who is growing on me! Note that this is a text book - no pictures here - so while you can read it to young children, there's nothing for them to look at. Lilly desperately wants a pet, and her only hope is to win a goldfish at the fairground even if it uses up all her allowance. She finally wins with her last shot, she picks the more active of the two remaining fish. She notes a black ring around the fish's eye, she decides to name it Blackbeard after the pirate.

So far so good. But the thing is, she discovers the fish can talk, and when she talks to it, she discovers he's depressed. The other fish at the fairground was Blackbeard's girlfriend and now he's heartbroken to be separated from her! Can Lilly help her new friend? This story reveals all! I liked it. Written lightly and amusingly, it was different, fun, and inventive. It's exactly what you need to stimulate a young person's mind, and I recommend it.

Watch Out For The Bears! by Gillian Rogerson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an amazingly entertaining story about the son of the man who looks after the weather. One day the weather keeper has to go out and he leaves his son, Tom, in charge of the weather huts where the weather is of course kept locked away from the bears. Everyone knows about bears and weather. Most of the time we grin and bear it, right? There is a very brief section at the end of this book where the author talks about how she came up with the idea for this story, and I found that as entertaining as the story itself. It sounds very much like the way I come up with oddball ideas for stories! And the way you need to as well, if you want to be an original and inventive writer! She sounds like a fun and interesting person.

But I digress. Tom is happy to take charge of the weather for the day and doesn't care about the bears. He's never even seen one. Unfortunately, when he went to check on the weather this, one of them was unlocked and the clouds were gone! There were bear prints! Tom has to track down those clouds or he'll get in trouble with his dad, and he does track them down, but unfortunately this marks the first of several adventures he has with those kleptomaniacal bears. Tom is industrious and very responsible though, so he pursues his task diligently and bears up well in the end. You knew he would, right?

The story was completely charming, and I enjoyed it immensely. I look forward to reading other stories by this author - several of which are free on Barnes & Noble and possibly other online outlets, even as you sit here wasting time looking at this review while those books go unattended! Get over there! Now!

Go To Sleep Mom by Mary Eakin

Rating: WARTY!

I don't negatively review many children's books because I tend to pick them carefully than others, and I use a little more, shall I say, relaxed criteria for them than I do more mature reading material, for an assortment of reasons. In this case I can't recommend this because it just didn't seem to get the job done.

The premise here is that the kid is put to bed, but gets up and discovers a list of chores his mom has to do before she goes to bed. he decides to "help." The first oddity is that he's woken by his mom running the vacuum cleaner around, which seems like an odd thing to do when you've just put your young kid to bed. Seriously? No! You run that in the morning to help wake them up for school or daycare or whatever! Or you get a Roomba to do it while you're out.

So the kid reads the list of chores: Vacuum, pack lunches, wash dishes, do laundry, bathe babies, wash dog. The list seemed a bit much. Who does lunches the night before? Who washes the dog and does laundry on a weeknight? I get that the idea here is to convey to kids a list of things mom does, and to educate children, but this list seemed more contrived to educate us to see how dumb mom is than anything else. She doesn't make a fresh lunch in the morning? She doesn't put a load of laundry in before she starts vacuuming so she's multi-tasking? She doesn't do another load before she bathes the babies, and another before she bathes the dog? These things have to be done sequentially all on one night? Every night?! Mom is so forgetful that she needs a list with check-boxes? It didn't seem realistic and it sure didn't seem intelligent.

I know kids are far less picky about things than I am, but kids are typically a lot sharper than too many people are willing to credit them, and I'm sure some will see this list as bizarre. Besides, the point here is to educate kids about all the things that mom (and dad - who I note is highly conspicuous by his absence here) does, and it seems to me there are much better ways to do it than the one this book explores.

The kid isn't represented as being too sharp either, because he's assuming that mom has never done any parental chores before this night, and that she can't handle her "mom job." That's neither smart nor kind. And he simply makes her job ten times harder. The artwork is pretty decent, but there's more to a good children's book than pretty pictures - or at least there should be. For me there ought to be a strong educational component, and I was sorry to see what was potentially a good idea go waste via poor execution. I wish the author all the best with her young children's books, but I cannot in good faith recommend this one. But at least I can check it off my reading list!

Orangutan by Rita Goldner

Rating: WORTHY!

I really like this book. It's very colorful and well-researched. It's not only telling a plausible and non-anthropomorphized story of a day in the life of a young Orangutan, it's also imparting facts about the life the animal leads. The animal is cute and sure to invoke feelings of kinship and protectiveness, and the story is neither too short nor too long. And what a great name for an author writing about an bright orange animal: Goldner! LOL!

One thing that I particularly liked is that the text, though small, is readily readable because if you put your thumb and forefinger together on top of the text and slide them apart, a plain text-box appears with the same text in a large font. You can also call it up by lightly tapping it twice with a finger. You remove the pop-up box with the same motion. This works for the story and the "Fun Fact" section which is on each page. it works on the iPad and on a smart phone, which is really nice since the text is really small there. Adding a voice reading the text (preferably by the author!) would be an improvement, but I was pleased with this as is. It's a great little book for youngsters and I recommend it.

A Dog in the Fog by Tanja Russita

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a cute, catchy little book for young children focused on silly rhymes and oddball situations, and illustrated with line drawings, mostly of animals. The title story is about this odd little dog who is walking on a log by a bog, gets caught in the fog and weirded out by the perception that its body parts are disappearing! I think the last line ought to have been "No head, no paw, no tail, no me," but that's just me! It was fun and I could see how this would make a great bedtime story if you covered your kid with the sheet like a white fog, as various body parts start seeming to disappear.

The second story is about a boy and his fish, and each has a name which is a palindrome of the other: Aron and Nora, which I adored. The third and final story is of an elephant enduring disturbingly rapid weather changes and making a new friend. It was fun, silly, and no doubt entertaining for its intended age group. I recommend it.

Kylie Jean Gymnastics Queen by Marci Peschke

Rating: WORTHY!

This is part of a series about young Kylie Jean, who is a fellow Texan as well as a confident and self-possessed young woman who discovers an interest in Gymnastics while watching the Olympics. She takes a class and meets a new friend - one who is deaf, so she also learns sign language.

It was a fun romp with nicely-done illustrations supporting the chapter book style, by the oddly-named Tuesday Mourning, which sounds like a book title by Jasper Fforde, but is actually a real person. It was nice to see exercise as part of the story as well as bringing in someone who clearly wasn't handicapped despite being deaf. If I have two complaints it is that first of all, Kylie's father was conspicuous by his absence. He's mentioned here and there, but he never really seems to be around.

The other issue is that there were no people of color visible which was not a pleasant thing to experience. Texas is populated by a diversity of peoples including American Indians, Indian Indians, and people of Chinese, Vietnamese, Hispanic, and African ethnicity, yet apart from one illustration which featured an African American family as background decoration, this was an all-Caucasian occasion again.

Despite that I'm prepared to recommend this as a worthy read because it has so much else going for it, and this is a positive review in the dire hope that if the author doesn't embrace diversity next time out, maybe the artist will do so on her behalf? I can't imagine she was explicitly instructed to draw only white folk, yet this is pretty much what she did!

Good Morning, Superman! by Michael Dahl

Rating: WARTY!

I would have liked to have rated this positively. I like to do that with children's books, but although I hold them, in some ways, to a less exacting standard than I do more mature work, I cannot dispense with all standards, and I have to rate this one negatively because I feel it sends the wrong messages. I did like the beautiful art by Omar Lozano - bold, bright, and colorful, but the book isn't a coffee table book. It's supposed to offer a message, and that's where the problem lay.

On the one hand it features an African American kid, of which see see far too few in children's books, but having offered that, it makes the kid subservient to an heroic white guy. There are no heroes of color we could have chosen here? The first real problem, however, was that in his haste to be heroic, the kid abandons his breakfast, spilling the bowl and leaving his dirty dishes and a banana skin on the table. This is the kind of responsibility we want our kids to learn? Not mine.

Brushing his teeth is presented as one of the boy's greatest fears which must be overcome instead of, as it could have been shown, a way of adding to his super powers by protecting his teeth. Just as Supergirl is shown as Superman's assistant, the kid's little sister is presented in the subordinate position of bringing him his lunch box. Slavery anyone?

I'm sorry, but while I can see what was being attempted here, this felt wrong-headed in so many ways that I cannot in good faith recommend it as a worthy read.

My T-Rex Gets a Bath by Chloe Sanders

Rating: WARTY!

This one is nicely illustrated and poetically written, but I felt it was shy of where it ought to be for several reasons, so I can't recommend it. The dinosaur is a very popular pull for kids because they are in many ways so alien and threatening, but they are also extinct, and therefore not really a threat! They're safe. But they're very different from mammals, so the idea of using one as a model for bathing and brushing teeth one didn't work in my opinion. Reptile and Dino dentition is very different from ours and their skin is nothing like ours (and we shed in different ways!).

I know you can argue that kids don't care or don't mind, or that this is a minor thing, but I think it's never too early to start educating children in small ways about similarities and differences between us, and that both make for interesting companions and great friends, and I think this was a case where similarities would have been more educational and more accurate. I thought the toothpaste illustrations were charming, but so would kids. If they read this, they're likely to want to try toothpaste painting themselves, which is fine in the right place and at the right time if you can afford to waste a tube of toothpaste, but it's not something you want them thinking about or trying to emulate at bedtime!

Also the tooth brushing aspect of the personal hygiene story while well-intentioned, failed for me because of the way it was presented. It was turned into a race between the boy and the T-Rex as to who could finish first, which is hardly conducive to a good brushing! Squirting water and splashing in the tub is going to earn you a wet floor and eventually, rotting floorboards if you're not careful! That's not to say that bath-time can't be fun and there can be no squirting or splashing, but it felt like one more straw of irresponsibility on the camel's back of good sense and moderation.

The really weird thing about this book was the paragraph-long disclaimer in the back! This ran to the effect that every effort has been made to ensure that the information in the book was accurate and complete, in both text and graphics, but the author and publisher do not warrant it because of the rapidly changing nature of science, research, known and unknown facts and the Internet?! That just sounded weird. I wonder what new information is going to come out that might tell us it's unwise to wash and brush teeth?

Maybe publishers have to put this in because some idiots have tried to sue them over things in the past, but it seemed strange - and slightly depressing - that you can't even put out a kids book without a disclaimer. Oh well. But even that oddity aside, I can't recommend this one.