Picture Book - River by Elisha Cooper

Illustrated by the author

2019, Orchard Books

HC $18.99

40 pgs.

Goodreads rating:  3.97 - 173 ratiugs

My rating:  Hmmmm.....4?
Endpapers:Map of the northeast, largely including the Hudson River

1^st line/s:  "Morning, a mountain lake.  A traveler, a canoe.  As she paddles out into the bluster middle of the lake, she turns for a last wave to the shore behind her.  Her journey begins.

My comments: A woman, alone paddles a canoe the entire 315-mile length of the Hudson River in New York, detailing many of her adventures, sightings, and trials.  It's a very interesting read for this adult, but I'm not sure how much it will hold a child's attention.  Definitely suited for a third or fourth (or even higher) geography/river study.

Goodreads: Caldecott Honor winner Elisha Cooper invites readers to grab their oars and board a canoe down a river exploration filled with adventure and beauty.

In Cooper's flowing prose and stunning watercolor scenes, readers can follow a traveler's trek down the Hudson River as she and her canoe explore the wildlife, flora and fauna, and urban landscape at the river's edge. Through perilous weather and river rushes, the canoe and her captain survive and maneuver their way down the river back home.
          River is an outstanding introduction to seeing the world through the eyes of a young explorer and a great picture book for the STEAM curriculum.
          Maps and information about the Hudson River and famous landmarks are included in the back of the book. 

PICTURE BOOK - Snail Mail: With Pull-Out Postcards by Sharon King-Chai

Illustrated by the author

2016, Hodder Children's Books (UK)

32 pgs. with 6 x 8 envelopes containing heavy-stock postcards

Goodreads rating: 5.0 - 2 ratings

My rating:  5

Endpapers: A map of the world with the "snail trail."

1^st line/s:  "Hi there!  I'm Sam, the Seashell Snail.  I live by the seashore."

My comments:  

I vacillated between a 4 and a 5 for this one, mainly because my adult mind questioned how snails could travel the world, and so quickly. But the premise of the book. - similar to the idea of the Jolly Postman books and Vera Williams' Stringbean's Trip to the Shining Sea - and the information presented are top-notch. So are the fun and fanciful Snail family and friends. Actually, the whole package is just plain FUN! It would fit perfectly into any sort of epistolary unit that a teacher may do in I vacillated between a 4 and a 5 for this one, mainly because my adult mind questioned how snails could travel the world, and so quickly. But the premise of the book. - similar to the idea of the Jolly Postman books and Vera Williams' Stringbean's Trip to the Shining Sea - and the information presented are top-notch. So are the fun and fanciful Snail family and friends. Actually, the whole package is just plain FUN! It would fit perfectly into any sort of epistolary unit that a teacher may do in school, too. Two thumbs up.

Goodreads:   Sam the Seashell Snail is too young to go surfing around the world with his brother, Tiger. Not wanting Sam to miss out on the adventure, Tiger sends him Snail Mail from Brazil, America, India, Japan and France. Tiger's last Snail Mail has a very special birthday surprise!
          With pull-out postcards to pore over, this fun and charming picture book will captivate even the most tech-savvy of children.
          A Jolly Postman for this generation.

POETRY PICTURE BOOK - Got Geography!

Poems selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins
Illustrated by Philip Stanton

2006. Greenwillow Books

32 pgs.

Goodreads rating:2.93

My rating: 4

Endpapers Deep brick-cranberry

16 poems (wish there were more!)

full-colored edge-to-edge painting using deep, gorgeous colors

Latitude Longitude Dreams

Magellan moved via stars
Steered his ship by celestial rays.
Columbus sailed on over the edge
Discovering lands and waterways.

They traversed their dreams, set their course
Voyaging over oceans and seas.
Etching earth with invisible designs
Crossing rivers, rivers, ice, and trees.

These lines that slide from pole to pole
Wrapping around the watery girth
Coordinate all of us on this globe
Our home, our ship, or planet earth.

         ~ Drew Lamm and James Hildreth

If I Were the Equator

If I were the equator
I would have an attitude.
I'd boast the most about my no degrees of latitude.
I'd say, though there are other lines who run from east to west
with nearly 25,000 miles I clearly am the best.
My equidistance from the poles,
I'd mention with a laugh,
makes me the one -- the only one -- who

splits the globe in half.
Smack dab
between the Tropics
with the sun high up above,
indeed,
I'd plead,
what on earth could there be
about me not to love?

             -Kathryn Madeline Allen

Horizon
Just as the thin line
in a long division problem
divides the greater number
by the smaller,
horizon
divides earth and sky.

Gozinta, my mother called division,
explaining to me
the mysteries of math.
But earth does not gozinta sky,
held in place by horizon,
else we would all be flung,
unwilling, into the greater stars.

            - Jane Yolen

My comments:  There are some great poems in here (J. Patrick Lewis, Carl Sandburg, David Harrison, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Jane Yolen, Kristine O'Connell George, and Marilyn Singer to name a few) - but it's a very short selection.  The gorgeous, brilliantly-colored illustrations set them all off perfectly.

Goodreads: Geography is more than maps and globes, more than latitude and longitude lines, more than continents, oceans, islands, and your own neighborhood.
          In Got Geography! Lee Bennett Hopkins gathers vivid poems by sixteen poets and Philip Stanton creates glorious artwork to show that geography isn't just about finding your way. It's the jumping-off point for dreams and imagination.
          If you've got geography, you're ready for adventure. . . .

Katy and the Big Snow - Virginia Lee Burton

Houghton Mifflin, 1943/1971
Brand new paperback edition has sparkly cover and STICKERS!
$6.99 paper
40 pages
My rating: 5

Virginia Lee Burton's picture books - over sixty years old - are stiill being published! The Little House, Mike Mulligan, Katy - this is incredibly cool, huh? And after reading Katy and the Big Snow again (it's been an incredibly long time) I know why.

There's a wavy border on every page. There's a compass rose on any page that shows the city of Geopolis. There are maps. There's excitement. There's a hero (heroine!)....

When a blizzard covers the city of Geopolis, big, strong Katy the bulldozer-with-a-plough is called out to help (to the rescue!)

The illustrations are primarily in aqua with black, red, yellow, green. and white as the only other touches of color. They're "old fashioned" and incredibly wonderful.

Wow! America - Robert Neubecker

Hyperion Books, 2006
44 pages - 2 fold open
For: Ages 4 up
Endpapers: Huge colorful outline map of the US.

At first I didn't think that Ella would be too interested in this book. However, she was fascinated with the huge, colorful U.S. map. She liked to learn where she lived, and was able to point to Pennsylvania after going to other states. She realized that Arizona, where Nan lives, is very far away. She now knows where Maine is (she visits her cousins there), and Florida, where Disney World is located. She kept flipping back to the map to "remind" me of the locales of these places!

The book is presented in huge double-page spreads (and in two cases, TRIPLE page spreads!) We begin in New England. "New England is famous for fishing and ships and Patriots and Pilgrims." The scene we see is a wharf beside the sea, with a yellow-clad fisherman holding up a huge (reddish-orange) lobster. Okay, so it's already been cooked..... There are sea gulls and lobster traps, whales and fish. We travel from New England to New York Harbor and turn the book around so that we can see the Statue of Liberty standing tall on the two pages. Then Niagara Falls. When we arrive in Washington, we have to turn the page around and around, because the buildings are rising from each of the edges. Back to horizontal for the southeastern seashore, then vertical again for Cape Canaveral. We continue to turn the book through the midwest and west, arriving in Hawaii before we end in Alaska.

Turning this large book around and around was a little disconcerting, but Ella appeared to love it. She looked at the pictures and listened to the simple explanations. (The two three-page spreads were the Robert E Lee floating down the Mississippi and the Grand Canyon.) Every illustration had so many different things to find, it became a game of "can you find....."

There were saguaro cactuses at the Grand Canyon. One of my little peeves - the Sonoran desert ends far below the Grand Canyon, though they're definitely found in southern Arizona. Oh well, I'll let it go.

We both enjoyed this book.

If America Were a Village - David J. Smith

A Book About the People of the United States
Illustrated by Shelagh Armstrong
for: middle grades
Kids Can Press, 2009
32 pgs.
Rating: 3.5
Great dedication

Welcome to America - population 306 million. This books tells of a village of 100 - each representing more than 3 million of America's people.
Who are we? Languages, citizenship
Where do we come from?
Where do we live? (by decade)
What are our families like?
What religions do we practice?
.....82 are Christians (54 Protestant, 24 Catholics, 2 Mormon and 2 "other")
....2 are Buddhist
.....1 is Jewish
.....1 is a Muslim
.....4 are "other" and...
.....10 have no religion
(It also shares world statistics)
What do we do? (1/4 attend school)
How old are we?
How wealthy are we?
What do we own?
What do we use? (energy & water-wise)
How helathy are we?
America past & future (size of the village over time)
Afterword & resources

Large illustrations look like paintings.
Really interesting....but the one about the world is even more interesting!

The Travel Game - John Grandits

Illustrated by R. W. Alley
Published May, 2009
Ages 5-8
32 pgs.
$16.00
Rating: 3
Clarion/HMH
Pumpkin Endpapers

A young boy lives with his Polish-American family of tailors in Buffalo, New York. He helps around the shop, and his extended family lives upstairs. Whenever he doesn't want to take a nap, his aunt plays the "travel game" with him. They spin a globe, point to a new place, and look it up in their book 1001 Places from Around the World. As they look up the pictures they make up stories as if they were there themselves. Usually, Tad falls asleep as he imagines, but this time he wakes himself up, covers his sleeping aunt, and returns to the tailor shop to help work

We get facts about what they eat (a Polish-American meal) and the place they visit: Hong Kong. Fairly interesting. Cute illustrations. Lots of white, though. I like the illustrations.

Greetings from the 50 States - Sheila Keenan

Illustrator: Selina Alko
For: Middle Grades
Pub: 2008
Rating 4/5
Read: Aug. 31, 2008

I enjoyed this book during a leisurely Sunday morning at Border's, over a Caramel Frappacino. Yum.

Each of the fifty states and Washington DC have a double-page spread, with an illustration of the state, important places in the state, and items related to the state (cows for Vermont, potatoes for Idaho, umbrellas and alligators for Florida, etc.) On the right is an explanation of where the state name came from, another explanation about the nickname, and when the state was admitted to the union.

Illustrations are great fun to look at, and the borders around the text have to do with each state...peaches are part of Georgia's border, musical notes for Tennessee, jazz instruments for Louisiana, bison for North Dakota, corn cobs for Iowa, and Hershey kisses for Pennsylvania. Ice cream cones for Missouri? Gonna have to research that one!

My one tiny disappointment: Tall saugaros, sprawling, colorful Grand Canyon,, Sedona, Pima Tribal Land, the Colorado River, and Phoenix. Granted, the capital city is important, BUT.....no TUCSON? Shame!

How I Learned Geography - Uri Shulevitz

For: Kids (just not TOO young)
Pub: 2008
Rating: 3/5
Read: Aug. 25, 2008
2009 Caldecott Honor


"When war devastated the land, buildings crumbled to dust. Everything we had was lost, and we fled empty-handed."

Accompanying illustrations by the author depict a very young boy with his parents. Shulevtitz states in his ending AUTHOR'S NOTE that he is four when they flee Poland, living in what is now Kazakhstan In the Soviet Union for six years. The story tells how they lived, in total poverty, in one room with another couple who were strangers. One day his father returns, not with the small amount of bread he has gone to the marketplace to obtain, but with a large rolled-up world map written in Russian. This map takes him for the next few years, via his imagination, to snowy mountains, burning deserts, wondrous temples, and cities of tall buildings. He dreams of being transported to exotic places, and this is how he survives.

The illustrations are pretty cool, beautifully drawn and colored. There's a little too much negative white space on each page for my liking, but the double-page illustrations of the bazaar and of his flying dream above the waterway make up for that, they're really great.

Okay. He was a little guy with a great imagination. But.....how did he know about all these exotic places? How did he know about stone carvings and papayas and mangoes and the shade of palm trees? It sure doesn't sound like they could afford books. It doesn't say that his father told him stories. I guess I want a little more information. The writing is simple, yes, but a little too sparse for me.

This book has gotten quite a few starred reviews, so it may end up getting awards. Yeah, I liked it, but there are others written this year that I like better.