Caldecott Award Honors

I don't even know where this book is going. I think it's trying to say that school is important, kind of? But it's also just one of those stories where it keeps one-upping itself in a really annoying, repetitive way, and then at the end the boy is in over his head. If he had only shot the rat.

I seriously doubt that, as she says, "The barn that Jesus was born in would look like a cave to us." I'm pretty sure it wasn't a cave, but was a structure built by humans. People living in the time and culture of Jesus were not living in caves.

What. This is a weird book. It feels like it should have a moral, but it absolutely does not. There's no way I can get a moral out of this, but it feels like it's moralizing about something. Maybe it's just a moral I can't see.

It could be real. It could be a nonfiction story as far as I know. It's just really confusing, really wordy, really long.

The style of the illustrations isn't very modern but they're pretty. There's not much to it. It's just another book where somebody turns out to have hidden talents they weren't expecting to have.

It's kind of cool, because it's fairly scientifically accurate, but it's not done in a very interesting way. It has good facts in it, but it's not very engaging, especially to kids nowadays because it's so wordy.

It's kind of a Scottish nursery rhyme. It's not terribly interesting. I wouldn't have sought it out except it won some kind of award.

You would think that he would speak in perfect English, because it takes place in China, and they certainly wouldn't be speaking to each other in English. That's kind of a weird convention, but I'm not sure whether it's racist. It's just weird.

It's kind of an old story, but personalized in this version. Strangely, in a book about seeing small details, there's a couple of typos. There's not much to it.

A series of prose poems about two baby deer growing up. It's pretty factual. For the most part the deer don't have that many human-like characteristics.