Looking for Adventure? Explore the Great Unknown Thru Reading!
By Selene Vasquez
PICTURE BOOK: AGES 4 THRU 8
Lucy Goosey
by Margaret Wild. Illustrated by Ann James
(CIP, unpaged, $15.95)
When it’s time to migrate, Lucy Goosey doesn’t want to leave the comforting familiar places around her home. “Don’t care, Don’t care, Don’t care!” she quacks, despite her mother’s admonitions that she’ll be left behind. A simple and straightforward look at the issue of separation from a parent.
NONFICTION: AGES 6 THRU 10
Celebrate Chinese New Year
by Carolyn Otto
(Holidays Around the World, National Geographic, 32 pps., $15.95)
A full page, color-photographed tribute to the unique delicacies, illuminating fireworks, and vividly colored dragons of this most festive of holidays. A back section includes simple directions for making Chinese lanterns, a fortune cookie recipe, and information on the Chinese calendar with zodiac signs.
POETRY: AGES 6 THRU 12
Brothers and Sisters: Family Poems
by Eloise Greenfield
Illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist
(Harper Collins, 32 pps., $17.99)
Here’s the love and admiration, the hurt and aggravation that captures siblings at various stages of their lives together. Realistic watercolors capture the range of emotions in the faces of the individual African Americans peopling the paintings.
POETRY: AGES 8 THRU 10
Food Hates You, Too and Other Poems
by Robert Weinstock
(Hyperion, 27 pps., $15.99)
Collection of delightfully bizarre poems for young picky eaters that stretches the imagination and tickles the taste buds. “If cotton candy, apple pie,/ and French fries looked at you/ And said, “Gross! Blecchh!/ Nope, I won’t try./ I’ll never like it. Ew!”
Selene Vasquez is a media specialist at Orange Brook Elementary School in Hollywood, Florida.#