I love this book. 
Ivy seems to like it but I don’t think she thinks its as funny as I think it is. Didja get that? This book is a series of notes between a boy and his mom about getting an iguana. Here are some of my favorite pages, you can click on the picture to make it bigger if you need to.
Would I recommend it? Yes, your kid might not think it’s as funny as you do, but parents need a good chuckle too!
This is my currently my favorite picture book. I found it in the library last year and we have checked it out many times since then. I love this book so much I’m not even sure what to say about it. I do know that it is currently out of print, a little googling has taught me that Riddell has many other books but I have not yet read any of them.
In this book Katya lives in a forest where it is always summer with her friend Brown (he’s the bear).
Then one day she wakes up to snow. This is Johns favorite picture:
I love the illustrations.
Katya discovers Jack Frost is in her forest,
and this part where she confronts him has made me cry a dozen times. 
Either I am completely ridiculous or it’s a really, really good book.
Would I recommend it? Yes!
We brought home Ready, Set, Go! after a recommendation that if we liked Peek-A-Who! we’d like this one too. And it’s true,Clara loved it and my favorite part was that Ivy loved “reading” it to her.
Ivy would read it like this:
“Ready, set, go! Ready, set, throw! Ready set, blow! Ready, set boat! Ready, set, snow! ect.”
Row was a tricky one for her, but it was a boat in the picture, and Clara didn’t seem to mind at all!
Would I recommend it? Yup, Peek-A-Who? seems to be a bit better for really young ages. After all I think we start playing peek-a-boo with babies when they are about 3 days old, takes a bit longer before we can teach them ready, set go and I think the familiarity of the word pattern is what made Clara laugh.
Ivy in her best Reading Rainbow pose!
First off I will say that the illustrations in this book are really wonderful, I love the soft colors and all the detail. Ivy likes the book and I think it’s mostly because she likes to find all the hidden animals and bugs in the pictures.
There I said something nice, now lets talk about the text. There is nothing wrong with it exactly, just that yellow butterflies don’t eat butter, blue butterflies don’t eat sky, and please don’t make me accidentally read a book to my girl that says little snakes only swallow little people and that sheep are scary. Granted, Stella is trying to reassure her younger brother who is apprehensive about sheep and snakes but Ivy and I still had to have a talk about how sheep were nice and snakes are cool, and that butterflies drink nectar from flowers. I also think this book has poor word flow. Add to that two kids named Stella and Sam and the combination creates something that is both challenging to read out loud (almost a tongue twister) and that misses the lyrical quality that many books have when spoken.
The back flap says that “Marie-Louise Gay is one of Canada’s leading children’s book author-illustrators.” and that her first two books about Stella “…have been sold in more than ten countries.” This lead me to wonder if I’m just a grump about books sometimes but in quick online search I found a few people who said that the first two were much better than this one. Maybe so but I hope the publisher spared the eight other countries!
Would I recommend it? Nope. I’d love to know if anyone has read her other books and liked them.
Forget what I said yesterday, this book doesn’t meet that criteria.
In this book little monkey lost his mom and a butterfly is trying to help him find her and getting it all wrong!
“No, no, no! That’s an elephant”
If you can get passed the fact that it is a rhyming book but “come” and “mom” don’t really rhyme (unless you pick up an accent and call her “mum” instead), and that butterfly has a creepy head (I think it’s the nose that bothers me) it’s a pretty good one!
Would I recommended it? Yes unless you can’t say mum or have a major phobia of butterflies with noses.
I think in order to be a really great picture book, the book needs to appeal to both kids and adults. In my perfect picture book world the kids would love hearing the books and the parents would love reading them, at least the first hundred times. Princess Hyacinth the Surprising Tale of a Girl who Floated by Florence Parry Heide illustrated by Lane Smith is just such a book.
In addition to being a fun to read funny book. I love that the words are all over the page.
And the illustrations crack me up! This is the princess weighted down with her heavy princess clothes.
Would I recommend it? Definitely!
I’ll start this post off with a confession. I received this book from a friend, and when I got it I thought it was dumb. There are few words, few pages, I didn’t even think a kid would like it.
I was totally wrong.
At 7 months old Clara loves this book. She laughs at every page, loves the mirror in the last one, and it has the added bonus of being a board book so even after it soaked in a pile of spit-up it’s still readable.
Would I recommend it? Yes. Baby giggles and grins are worth reading a book adults cringe at!
Behind the Willows 