Reviews
Greetings, Asia!
“These titles focus on each continent’s natural features, highlight many of its animals, and present a brief overview of the people. Useful information is presented in an enjoyable style. Different size fonts and background colors are used to break up the text and add… View →
The Bat-Chen Diaries
This book is a selection of diary entries, writings, poems, and drawings of Bat-Chen Shahak, a 15-year-old Israeli girl who was killed by a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv in 1996. Although she died at a young age, Bat-Chen left be-hind a lot of herself, as the reader can see through her… View →
Frank, Who Liked to Build: The Architecture of Frank Gehry
This biography of a famous Canadian-American architect is presented through freeform illustrations that grab your attention the way his buildings do. Energy jumps off each page, with the book’s combination of evocative words and emblematic works. Author… View →
Death in the Donner Party: A Cause-and-Effect Investigation
Grades 1 – 3, Grades 4 – 5: This nonfiction book gave me a much better understanding of how the Donner Party ran into so many problems as they were immigrating to California. They first decided to take Lansford Hastings shortcut which was suppose to take 350-400 miles off… View →
Lemonade for Sale
“These books will add a breath of fresh air to beginning-reader collections. The stories center on a group of friends who live near a small park in an urban neighborhood. The events and dialogue reinforce the “Real Kids” in the series title and will strike a chord… View →
Drop by Drop: A Story of Rabbi Akiva
“How lovely to have this jewel-colored picture book to share the love story of Rachel and Akiva with elementary-age children. The man who became a famous sage at the end of the first century was too poor to attend school, and started his work life as an illiterate shepherd. And… View →
Best Friends
“These three stories intended for very beginning readers subtly reinforce concepts of friendship, sportsmanship, and emotional expression. I Am Mad! features a bullying older sister, and is the weakest of the lot, due perhaps to the difficulty of telling a complex story with such View →
My Name Is Hamburger
The title of Jacqueline Jules’s highly recommended new novel-in-verse reflects the ironies of growing up Jewish in a small southern town in the mid – twentieth century. Trudie Hamburger has loving parents and close friends. Her father’s German accent and her family’s… View →
In the past century, Jews, as well as other peoples, have increasingly been marrying out of the faith, merging cul-tures and religions into families. This book represents an attempt to deal with this issue as a young girl struggles to understand how she and her grandfather are related… View →
Hanukkah Moon
As Da Costa reminds us in an author’s note that precedes the story, Hanukkah "celebrates a time more than 2,000 years ago, when a small group of Jews fought an army of Syria and took back the holy city of Jerusalem. "When the Jews rededicated their temple and lit the… View →
A Star in My Orange: Looking for Nature's Shapes
“Through one-sentence descriptions and full-color, uncluttered photographs, readers are taken on a journey of discovery in the natural world. Rau begins with a star in the sky and then moves to objects that children might be able to examine more closely to find that shape,… View →