Caldecott Award Honors

It's not a bad book, but it's boring and very dated. It's not that common for modern children to have experienced sheep in a meadow, or gourds drying. Or writing on a slate.

It's nothing too deep, but it's still a good message. The art is fun to look at and interesting to the eye, with word balloons to read and lots of color. It's a pretty realistic portrayal of two boys hanging out together and the kinds of things they would say.

It's cute. It's got an inclusive message without being over the top, which is pretty nice.

It's very common in fables and myths, that idea of a set number of people with specific talents that all come in handy in a very contrived situation. It happens in The Seven Simeons, and it happens in The Five Chinese Brothers.

It's got a very clear message of "the grass is always greener on the other side". Leo Lionni's illustrations made of collages and patterns are really nice to look at, but the story isn't really very interesting or better than books like The Velveteen Rabbit.

I guess it's a nursery rhyme. It's a very meandering hypothetical that doesn't go anywhere or have any kind of relation to reality. Everything about this book is weird.

Despite winning a Caldecott Honor, this book is far too long and wordy to read to a child. It's 96 pages long, and the illustrations are mostly in the margins. This is really a novella-length biography, not a picture book. So it's not just wordy, but very long.

I'd say the quality is comparable to Dr. Seuss's ABCs, but with no nonsense words. Everything's pretty straightforward, with things that kids-- of the time-- would actually encounter. Some things that kids would still encounter. But you know, there's not a lot of organ grinders nowadays.

It's interesting, but definitely not a modern-style kids book. It's not a bad message and wouldn't upset a child, but it's too long. And it's not popular nowadays to like clowns.

There's no moralizing to it, but also no indication of why this happened to the birds. Just that at some point they didn't have feathers, and then they had feathers. Ta-da.