Do You See a Mouse?

Our rating: *****

There’s a mouse in the Park Snoot Hotel! Everybody says there is no mouse, but manager Josh Posh calls in the professional mouse catchers Hyde and Snyde to make sure.

This is one of my absolute favorite picture books. It’s great fun to find the mouse on every page. Note to those reading out loud: This book is much more fun if a different voice is used for each character!

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Our rating: ****

Chewandswallow is an almost ordinary town. It has all sorts of stores, except grocery stores. Nobody needs them. All the food falls from the sky. Then one day, the weather goes haywire and the portions get bigger and bigger. The townspeople have no choice but to set out for a new land.

This is a very funny book. Pay close attention to the illustrations and you’ll find some very interesting things. Excellent to read aloud as well as to yourself. A very nice picture book.

Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue

Our rating: ****

Pierre is a boy who doesn’t care about anything. What will it take to make him care?

This is a charming story. I put it under the category of Younger Readers, but even though I read much more advanced books, I still love Pierre.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

Our rating: ***

Ojo the Unlucky and his Unc Nunkie visit the Crooked Magician on their way out of the Blue Forest. There they witness the Patchwork Girl being brought to life. All seems well, but an accident occurs. Unc Nunkie and the Crooked Magician’s wife, Margolotte, are turned into marble statues. The precious Powder of Life, which could have restored them, is wasted on a phonograph. Ojo sets out with the Patchwork Girl and a Glass Cat to find the necessary ingredients to bring the statues back to life. The quest takes them all over Oz, and they, in the company of the Scarecrow and Dorothy (the Glass Cat stayed behind for fear of breaking), visit many interesting new races, including the Tottenhots, the Hoppers, the Horners, and a large giant!

This is a fun book with quite a few puns. (Nowhere near as many as in The Emerald City of Oz.) Scraps, the Patchwork Girl, is quite a character. Also, this is the same Crooked Magician who gave the Powder of Life to Old Mombi in The Land of Oz.

The Twenty-One Balloons

Our rating: *****

When Professor William Waterman Sherman begins his long-planned balloon voyage, he hopes to take a long trip (about a year) on which he might easily end up being the first to fly across the Pacific Ocean, but when his planning goes awry, he ends up on the supposedly uninhabited island of Krakatoa. Far from it! The society and lifestyle established on the island is extremely unique, packed with amazing inventions, and containing a giant diamond mine.

This is a book I enjoy reading again and again. A highly imaginative story, based off of scientific facts and absolute nonsense. I definitely recommend this one.