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Aug 13, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Laura Hughes |Christina Geist |Tim Bowers
The fine message here: Don’t shy away from the chance to be and have a good friend. Stepping out is better than hiding out. Ana Moose prefers being alone. She doesn’t have to worry about finding the right thing to say or being picked last for teams. Blending into her surroundings, she dubs herself Anonymoose. Then she sees her classmate Peter, a porcupine, building a fort and wishes she could share her own architectural ideas without revealing herself.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Laura Hughes |Christina Geist |Tim Bowers
Children will be charmed by the furry friendships and fascinated by the visual details. A colony of prairie dogs is caught between security and risk-taking. Earl is afraid to leave the burrow. He keeps digging, while his five buddies entreat him to join them in the fresh air. As Earl warns against outside dangers—coyotes, an impending storm—they are oblivious to shadowy creatures lurking and the dark clouds gathering…until the pelting rain sends them scurrying.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Laura Hughes |Christina Geist |Tim Bowers
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of... Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol. The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip.
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Mar 26, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Nidhi Chanani |Dav Pilkey |José Garibaldi |Tim Bowers
Another “jawsome” combination of small adventures and clear, worthy messaging. Finny friends leap into a third round of adventures and attitude adjustments. Mako shark Mack is proud of his surfing prowess—until slender, graceful sawshark Telo beats him out at the first Surfin’ Shark Competition, and he grumpily announces that if he can’t be the best, he’s done.
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Dec 16, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Chloe Dominique |Laura Hughes |Christina Geist |Tim Bowers
Pleasant enough but not particularly original. Uplifting messages of positivity from the Today show anchor. Hope springs eternal, so the saying goes. Kotb agrees, here delivering to children the cheery news that hope lives inside all of them and that whatever they might wish for can be theirs. All they need is a sunny outlook, and the possibilities for happy outcomes are virtually endless.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Boris Dralyuk |Jennifer Croft |Tim Bowers |Nicole Miles
by Taras Prokhasko & Marjana Prokhasko & translated by Boris Dralyuk & Jennifer Croft ; illustrated by Marjana Prokhasko ‧Sweet but not saccharine, with occasional long thoughts buried in the fuzzy warmth. In this tale originally published in Ukraine, mole twins born on the first day of spring discover a generally welcoming world outside their burrow as the seasons pass. Beech Forest is, by and large, a friendly place.
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Dec 6, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Tim Bowers |Mo Willems
Hilarious, high-stepping tributes to a musical niche that never was. For record collectors and fans of old-timey music, an alphabetical sampler of rockin’ tunes from the likes of Mandy and the Meerkats and the Fabulous Foxes of Folk. Tongue firmly in cheek, Bell explains in her introduction that she’s a collector of records by animal musicians, from the 1940s to the ’80s.
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Aug 29, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Dav Pilkey |Tim Bowers
A feel-good tale of a clever and determined stallion set against a well-developed landscape. In mid-19th-century Nevada, a colt named Sky grows up to lead his band of wild horses. Parry’s moving story follows the pattern of her recent animal tales, A Wolf Called Wander (2019) and A Whale of the Wild (2020), chronicling a wild animal’s life in the first person, imagining its point of view, and detailing and appreciating the natural world it inhabits.
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Jun 20, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Cara Devins |Laura Hughes |Christina Geist |Tim Bowers
by Cara Devins ; illustrated by K-Fai Steele ‧ A charming portrayal of a whimsical trickster librarian who knows how to get kids reading. Change can be challenging but good. Summer’s over, and the Belford Elementary students are thrilled to return to school. But when they learn that Ms. Stack, their librarian, has moved away, they hatch a plan to refuse to read with the new librarian, Ms. Bangle, until Ms. Stack returns.
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Jun 13, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Laura Hughes |Christina Geist |Tim Bowers
One dreary day in room 2B, a class of kids embraces a sandwich as instructor. On the first day of school, a light-skinned man carefully writes the words Mr. S on the blackboard and then, noticing that a tree has crashed on his car, dashes out to the parking lot, leaving behind a stack of papers and a sandwich.
