Skippyjon Jones: Lost in Spice

The original Skippyjon Jones was a lot of fun. My kids and I had a ball doing cheesy Mexican accents for all the chihuahuas and we laughed when Skippito Friskito punctured the Great Bumblebeeto.

The second Skippyjon book, Skippyjon Jones: In the Doghouse was a little trip into...well, trippiness. I'm not going to say anyone was smoking crack when they wrote that one, but it didn't make a ton of sense. In fact, the subsequent books made less and less sense, even for the delusional daydreams of a Siamese cat who thinks he's a chihuahua.

So now we have Skippyjon Jones: Lost in Spice and at last there's another SJ book that makes some sense. In this book, Skippyjon blast into space where he encounters an alien twin -- a Martian Skippyjon in glowing green. And why is he lost in spice (an inside joke only for parents)? Because the Red Planet is covered in chili powder, of course. That's why it's red.

The pictures are bright and attractive; I do like Judy Schachner's artwork. The story makes about as much sense as the first book, and considerably more sense than the second book. Worth buying in hardback? Probably not, but perhaps worth it in paperback and certainly worth checking out from the library.

That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown

I picked this up at the Scholastic Warehouse Sale for my almost-4 year old and it has become an instant favorite. That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown is written by Cressida Cowell, of How to Train Your Dragon fame; like those books, this one has a little edge and quite a lot of humor.

Emily Brown and her rabbit, Stanley, have many adventures. So many, that they catch the eye of the queen, who immediately decides she wants Stanley (or Bunnywunny, as she insists on calling him) for herself. She sends the army, the navy, even the air force, begging, bribing and finally commanding Emily Brown to turn him over. Naturally, Emily refuses. At last, the "silly, naughty queen" sends her special commandos to steal Stanley in the night.

Emily storms the castle, rescues the now-pink Stanley -- "His name is not Bunnywunny!" -- and explains to the queen the secret of creating a real toy of her own.

Emily is strong and likable, the plot is funny with lots of opportunity for silly accents if you're into that sort of thing for your bedtime reading, and the illustrations by Neal Layton are a nice blend of collage and sketch and watercolor. Having read it every night for the last week, I can tell you that it hasn't gotten old for me yet, which is a good thing, because my daughter shows no signs of letting it go anytime soon.

A great book for any child with a special "lovey." It's been around for a while, so it may be at your public library. Otherwise, snag a paperback at your local Scholastic Warehouse Sale. It's a cutie.

Happy Earth Day: Pond Circle

In honor of Earth Day, here's a book for the preschool/kindergarten set that clarifies, very simply and beautifully, the circle of life in a pond. Pond Circle, by Betsy Franco, is written on a "This is the House that Jack Built" model: "This is the algae, the jade green algae," and "This is the skunk, the shy striped skunk," etc. Each animal depends on the others for food, and they all depend, directly or indirectly, on the algae, which is the foundation of the whole pond.

If there were no algae, there would be no mayfly nymph; without the nymph, there would be no diving beetle; without the beetle, no frogs would eat, and so on through snakes and owls and raccoons until at last we meet the stalking coyote. At the very back of the book are a couple pages with more facts about each animal or plant in the story.

Love the pictures on this one; they're either painted on wood or painted to look like wood grain, the grain itself suggesting the ripples in the pond water or the eddying colors of a sunset. Pictures are all on 2-page spreads, very large and colorful, making this a good choice for a group read-aloud. This one will play especially well with preschoolers because of its engaging rhythm and repeated word patterns.

The publisher says this one is good from age 4 up through 3rd grade, but I doubt you'd find many 9 year olds wanting to read it. On the other hand, I bet they'd listen in if you were reading it to a younger child. A nice book to introduce children to the idea of the interconnectedness of our environment.

Images courtesy of BarnesandNoble.com

Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa

I have a pony lover at my house. Because of that, I have endured countless hours of My Little Pony books and videos. As books go, My Little Pony isn't going to win the Caldecott Medal any time soon. It might win the Fast Pass to a Headache Award, or maybe the Crushingly Boring Medal, but great literature it ain't.

Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa, by Erica Silverman, has been a lifesaver in a world otherwise populated with pink and purple ponies that all have hair like Pamela Anderson.


This is a nice little series that works well as either read-aloud books or as early chapter books for emerging readers. It's on a par with Henry and Mudge or Mr. Putter and Tabby -- short line lengths, easier but not babyish vocabulary, lots of colorful pictures. Each book is broken into 4 chapters and the situations the characters deal with are on a fairly simple order.


What I like about these books is the character of Cocoa, Cowgirl Kate's horse. He's miffy, a little selfish, always hungry, prone to misunderstanding and just generally kind of a pill. My 3 year old daughter loves him and even my 6 year old son laughed at some of his antics when I was reading aloud one day (he says he didn't but I heard him giggle).

The illustrations are so nice -- bright and fun. You may recognize the style: Betsy Lewin has also illustrated Click Clack Moo: Cows that Type and the Duck books that it spawned (Giggle Giggle Quack, Duck for President, etc.) She lends a nice touch of whimsy to the books.

The situations have a nice balance of friendship and humor and respect. In Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa: Partners, Cocoa doesn't want new horseshoes. He'd rather have cowboy boots like Cowgirl Kate. She patiently lets him try on one of her boots until he admits it doesn't fit. Later in the same book, Cowgirl Kate has to coax Cocoa (say that three times fast!) into doing their chores, reminding them that they are partners and must stick together. When he splashes into the pond with her after their work is done, she says "Couldn't you go swimming without me?" and he reminds her that they are partners "through wet and dry." It's sweet, but with a light touch.

It's a lovely series that makes a welcome change from the sugary world of the pastel ponies. The stories have actual content, rather than mindless activity (read enough MLP books and you will know what I mean). This one is good as a read-aloud from about age 3 and up, though I think you could go younger if you had a real horse lover. It should be good as an early chapter book through age 6 and possibly through age 7 (Second Grade) depending on your reader. It should be readily available at your library or in paperback through your favorite bookseller.

Pinkalicious

Sometimes, ideas for books just tickle me...well, pink.

Pinkalicious, the title character, eats too many pink cupcakes and voila! She turns pink from head to toe. She is thrilled. "I was so beautiful, I cried." she says. Then she runs around yelling "I'm Pinkerbelle! Look at me, I'm Pinkerbelle!"


Her mother takes her to the doctor, who prescribes a diet of green food to cure her "pinkititis." Yuck! No way Pinkalicious is signing up for that. She sneaks one more pink cupcake and wakes up...RED! Oh no, this won't do. She buckles down, eats her greens, and returns to normal.

If you have a 3-5 year old who loves pink, this book will be an instant hit, and deservedly so. It's charming, funny, and a pleasure to read.

Enter Purplicous.

Purplicious is not charming. In fact, it's rather appalling, especially following on the heels of something as sweet as Pinkalicious. It loses the light, humorous tone that made Pinkalicious so readable and gives us some mean girls, picking on Pinkalicious for her love of pink. Yes, Pink goes on to meet a girl who loves purple and admits that perhaps there's more to life than pink, but it seems to me that they've completely misjudged the target audience. The publisher lists this one as a book for 5-8 year olds, but I can't see many 7 or 8 year olds with this book. It's a preschool/kindergarten book --maybe up to age 6 -- and as such the mean-girl behavior is bewildering to kids -- why would anyone be so mean about liking pink? This is not how it is in preschool, unless your preschool has a Lord-of-the-Flies quality that ours lacks.

Enter Goldilicious.

Goldilicious has a premise that is more appropriate to the true target audience of 3-5 year olds. Goldilicious is Pink's unicorn. Adult readers will realize the unicorn is an imaginary friend (he becomes see-through whenever Pink's mom is around) and he and Pink have wonderful adventures together. And guess what? Now Pink has a fetish for all things gold! Go figure! Kind of thin, as plots go, but at least no one's being nasty to each other.

Goldilicious exists because Pinkalicious is a lucrative franchise. Anymore it seems almost any book that sells well will spawn enough sequels to completely exhaust an otherwise good idea. It happened with Skippyjon Jones (with ever-decreasing lucidity) and Walter the Farting Dog (how many books about gassy dogs do we need?) and Olivia (and you can certainly argue that Olivia's franchise was spinning out thinner and thinner until she was picked up and made into a cartoon by NickJr.)


My advice: get Pinkalicious if you have a preschooler who loves pink, check out Goldilicious from your local library, and leave Purplicious on the shelf.

Classic Monday, Now onThursday! (Or Why George and Martha Got a Little Sidetracked...)

Bookivore had every intention of posting on Monday, but Thursday and Friday of last week we got buried in snow. Then the kids were off for MLK's birthday, and then, after only ONE DAY back at school, we got covered with this:

Yes, that's ice.

So, we had yet another snow day. We're up to 5 now. It's looking like we'll be making up snow days until mid-June. Anyway, with all three of my children home, I have gotten precisely nothing done. Until today.

And George and Martha, by James Marshall, deserve my undivided attention.

These books have been around since the 70s and early 80s and they are family favorites around here. What's great about them is that they work on two levels: first as excellent read-aloud stories, and second as good books for early readers.

Two of the truly charming things about George and Martha are their friendship and the dry, witty humor that often underlies their activities. The writing is for children, but it's good children's writing: writing that doesn't talk down to them or over-simplify things. Kids get the humor in George and Martha.

Each book is divided in to 5 short stories, which qualifies them as "chapter books" on the same order as the Henry and Mudge books. Sometimes the stories are connected, but often they are not. In George and Martha:Back in Town, the story "The Big Scare" has George leaping out at Martha and shouting "Boo!" The startled and annoyed Martha warns him that she's going to scare him next. The rest of the story is George saying to himself, "Any minute now, Martha is going to scare the pants off me!" and looking for her in unlikely places, such as beneath the kitchen sink, where she patently would not fit. He spends the rest of the story in paranoid anticipation until Martha, calmly reading in her hammock, finally says, "Oh, I'm sorry --I forgot to scare you." The following story, "The Amusement Park," has George and Martha enjoying the roller coaster, the Ferris wheel and the bumper cars before finally taking a trip through the tunnel of love. THAT'S when Martha yells "BOO!" and George screams "Have Mercy!" Martha remarks, "I guess I didn't forget after all."

Sometimes their friendship is strained, as when George, the new lifeguard, has to give Martha a bawling out for misbehaving on the beach and she beans him with his megaphone. "This is a tough job," he says as she storms off.

Other times, they are quick to come to each other's rescue, as when George attempts to go off the high-dive and panics at the very top. "I'm coming!" shouts Martha (who earlier said you wouldn't catch her up there!). She climbs to the top and does a cannonball and in the huge splash that follows, George is able to get down without anyone seeing him or making fun of him.

Another favorite of ours is from One Fine Day. George decides in "The Icky Story," to tell an icky story while he and Martha are eating. "Have some consideration!" Martha says. But he tells it anyway. In revenge, Martha tells her own icky story and George is too grossed out to eat his dessert. "You win," says George. "Don't make me do it again," says Martha.

This is no sappy My Little Pony love, it's the portrait of a friendship between two imperfect characters who nonetheless love each other and are committed to taking care of each other.

There are 7 books in the series, as well as a new collection of early readers. I can't comment on those, but I would have my doubts about anything that played fast and loose with Marshall's excellent prose. Likewise it was made into a series for HBO, but since we are probably the only family in America without cable, I can't comment on that either, other than to say that cartoons based on really excellent books seldom capture the essence of what makes the books so good.

Read them to your preschoolers, then get your first and second graders to read them to you. Either way, they're getting a serving of great kids' literature.

How to Potty Train Your Monster

What a cute book. How to Potty Train Your Monster by Kelly DiPucchio takes the potty training concept book and turns it on its head. Instead of a 2-3 year old, the monster must be 200-300 years old. Instead of a smaller potty chair, monsters need huge potty chairs. And of course, monsters don't read books on the potty, they eat them. Naturally, Bookivore appoves of this wholeheartedly.

The artwork by Mike Moon is cartoony and fun, and it does a nice job of treating a sometimes-serious subject in a lighthearted way. If the battle over toilet training has gotten tense at your house (like it sometimes has at mine) this is a good tool for defusing the stress, for you if not for your child.

It sure helped me to remember to lighten up a little and realize I'm going to look back on the potty training years with laughter. Might as well start now.

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 5

Since the holidays will be upon us before we know it, I wanted to include an alphabet book that is a special favorite at our house. We use it around Christmastime not really to learn our letters, but to recount the story of Jesus' birth. If you've been reading all week, you'll know that I am biased toward alphabet books that tell a story so that the letter-learning is embedded in some context. Also, I am a sucker for beautiful artwork. B is for Bethlehem, by Isabel Wilner, has both.


The story of the nativity is told in rhyme, each rhyme beginning with a letter of the alphabet. It's a lucid and lovely retelling of the Christmas story -- perhaps not the one you'd want your kids to hear if it's their first time hearing it, but more than adequate for children who are familiar with the biblical account.


The pictures, by Elisa Kleven, are pure joy -- mixed media collage and drawing in vibrant colors that really bring the story to life. Like Steve Jenkins, I don't know anyone else who does collage quite like Kleven does. Her style is unique and gorgeous. These are pictures that I and my kids never get tired of looking at.

It's been around for a while -- long enough to be out in boardbook format -- but if you can track down a hardcover it would be worth it for the larger picture size and the durability. Especially if you, like me, want it to last for many Christmases to come.

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 4

This post is a bit of a cheat because I'm not going to talk about a single book. Rather, I'm going to talk about a category of books called Special Interest Alphabet Books (SAIB): books built entirely around a particular area in which your child has a marked interest. And yes, I just made that up.

This particular book, The Beetle Alphabet Book by Jerry Pallota, is a great, and at our house much-loved, example of this genre. The entire book is devoted to beetles. If you have a bug lover at your house, this is the book for you. Pallota's books are for older kids, 4 years and up. Even my 8 year old occasionally picks this one up because it's loaded with interesting factual information about beetles -- beetle characteristics, weird stuff beetles do, exotic beetles -- it reads like a children's encyclopedia. Because it's so rich with information, my children come back to it again and again. It was an excellent tool for my son's kindergarten year to reinforce letter and sound recognition and it was the hands-down choice for Bring Your Favorite Book To School Day.

Pallotta is probably the king of this kind of book. By my very unscientific count, he's got something like 21 different alphabet books, all highly specific. Here's an example from the text of The Construction Aphabet Book:

The subjects he covers range from airplanes (2 books) to boats to flowers. Vegetables, furry animals, birds, reptiles, the desert, frogs, dinosuars, the ocean, even skulls and extinct animals have their own books. You can visit his website for a complete list of books (he does some neat stuff with math concepts, too).

Two warnings about Pallotta's books: he uses different illustrators for each volume, so the quality of the artwork can sometimes be uneven. The Beetle Alphabet Book has gorgeous pictures, but The Yucky Reptile Alphabet Book has a couple pictures which are dark and make it hard to pick out detail. For this reason, it might be better to go to the bookstore or library and see what you're getting. Also, on occasion he chooses something to represent a letter which doesn't make that letter's sound. This happens twice in The Yucky Reptile Alphabet Book: once with Knob-Tailed Gecko (which he notes is a silent K and adds Komodo Dragon to rectify) and again with Gila Monster for G. If you grew up in the Southwest, as I did, you know that Gila is pronounced "hee-lah." Not at all an English G sound.

Beyond Pallotta, there are any number of other SIABs out there.

There's this one, above, for the dancer in the family. And this one, below, for the dog lover.

W is for Woof is part of a series of SAIBs, which are shown below. It covers some unsual interests, like travel and camping, along with more common interests like cats and horses.

The point of all this is that children always learn more when that learning is embedded in something they're already interested in. It's more than worth the time to seek out alphabet books that will build on that interest.

All images from Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 3

This is one of our favorite alphabet books. What sets it apart from other alphabet books is the stunning quality of its artwork. The rhyming text detailing all sorts of beautiful and exotic sea life also makes it worth adding to your home collection.

The pictures are all by Steven Jenkins, collage artist extrordinaire. Every time I read this book, I am struck again by the beautiful layers of torn and cut paper that make up the pictures. There just isn't anyone who does collage art like Jenkins.


The rhyming text, by Deborah Lee Rose, will introduce kids to all manner of interesting ocean life -- anemones, grey whales, dolphins, manatees, jellies, narwhals, umbrellamouths and viperfish and my favorite page, zooplankton. There's a nice balance between animals children will know (crabs, penguins, octopus) and those that will probably be new (narwhals, zooplankton, umbrellamouths). There's also a nice correspondance between the letters represented and their beginning sounds. For the letters W and X, "...blue Whales eXhale..."; maybe not the first letter of the word, but certainly a better representation of the sound X makes than the all-too-common "xylophone."

At the back of the book, as with all Jenkins books, there's a section with extra information about all the animals in the book. Excellent for older kids who are interested in ocean critters, or to incorporate this book into a larger unit about ocean life.

This book is out in paperback, but I think it's worth tracking down in hardcover; if your kids are anything like mine, this book's going to get a lot of repeat use.

All pictures via BarnesandNoble.com

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 2

Here's an alphabet book that actually tells a story. Letters thrown at the reader with nothing to ground them just don't "stick" the way letters embedded in a story do. For this reason, I've always favored story-based alphabet books over those which are more random. Like The Alphabet Book, by PD Eastman -- reeeaallllly not a fave.



Kipper's A to Z; An Alphabet Adventure has lovely watercolor pictures, engaging and mostly familiar characters, and an actual story that gives the alphabet some context. Kipper and his friend Pig are looking for animals...first they find an Ant, which they put in a Box, then a Caterpillar...and so on through the alphabet. There's a Zebra, the quintessential Z animal, who keeps showing up at the wrong time, giving kids the opportunity to set him straight. It's a nice little ramble through the alphabet and it shows both upper and lowercase letters, which may be helpful to older kids.

If you're looking for something to introduce the alphabet, particularly to younger children, this is a good choice because of the coherent story. It probably won't fly with older (like Kindergarten) kids, but for the preschool and toddler crowd it's a good one.

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 1

I used to really loathe alphabet books. Generally, they're harder to read than other picture books, and seldom do they have anything that really passes for a story. Often they're just random words that happen to begin with the appropriate letter. However, there have been a few, a very few, that were really head and shoulders above the crowd. One of these is I Spy Little Letters.

Many kids have enjoyed the I Spy series and its sister books, the Little I Spy board books and early readers. This is a board book that is especially good not just for learning the alphabet, but for teaching letter recognition.

If you have a 3, 4 or 5 year old who is beginning to recognize specific letters, this is a great resource. All the text is in riddle form, with clues about the letters that children can then solve by identifying the correct letter: "I spy letters/On a big red A" and the A is red and covered with letters. As the child identifies it, she reinforces her understanding of what an uppercase A should look like. All the letters have some clearly distinguishing (and alphabetic) feature -- S might be covered with sand, G with glitter, B with balloons, and so on.

Most importantly, the letters in this board book are LARGE -- a good 1.5-2 inches tall by my measure. This makes it much easier for little eyes to perceive the differences in shapes. The photography, like all the little I Spy books, is bright and clear and appealing to kids and the riddles make a game out of learning to recognize letters. Rather than just throwing letters and words at them and hoping they'll assimilate the information, this book gets them to interact with the text, increasing the chances that they'll remember what they've read and transfer it to other situations.

It's a great choice for preschool-aged kids.