Confession: I've never been a big fan of Shakespeare. Hopefully I won't get my English degree revoked for saying that, but I didn't really encounter him much until college, and reading numerous lines of 400-year-old dialog full of words I didn't recognize just didn't excite me much. Of course, I still respect very much his contributions to the English language, but I suppose my interest in Shakespeare has been more historical than literary.

So I suppose the collection in Poetry for Kids: William Shakespeare is perfect for people like me, or people who've never read Shakespeare at all, because it is basically his "greatest hits." (I know it says "for kids," but I imagine most readers will be teenagers or adults.)

There are some short snippets, some longer monologues, and some sonnets, but many recognizable pieces and lines can be found here -- from Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be," to Romeo and Juliet on the balcony, the three witches with their "Double, double toil and trouble," and "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Even aside from the major pieces, I was reminded of just how many phrases from Shakespeare are still around today, such as "mortal coil," "sound and fury," "the game is afoot," etc.

Each piece includes a list of its more unusual words/phrases after it, with definitions, which is very helpful. For those who would like more Shakespeare in their home but don't want to read entire plays, this is a great addition, and the illustrations are very nice too.

(Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.)

Scrounged From: NetGalley

Format: Kindle
Author: William Shakespeare, Marguerite Tassi
Illustrator: Merce Lopez
Pages: 48
Content Advisory: None

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Winter has its perks, but as a resident of New England I am more than ready for spring by the time it finally gets here! Here are some picture books to help celebrate spring, or at least to usher in its approach.

"Every year Mom and I plant a rainbow." Planting a Rainbow is a simple description of how a flower garden takes shape during the spring. The narrator and their mother plant seeds, bulbs, and seedlings in red, orange, yellow, even green (ferns), blue, and purple. Lois Ehlert's colorful illustrations focus solely on the flowers and dirt, and show as they grow from tiny plants to full-fledged blooms -- a lovely and colorful celebration of new life during spring!

Rechenka's Eggs, by Patricia Polacco, is a sweet Russion story of Babushka, a skilled egg decorator, who saves an injured goose one day. When the goose accidentally destroys her decorated eggs she is upset, but she finds that "miracles" can happen as "Rechenka" the goose begins producing beautifully decorated eggs all on her own! The illustrations here are detailed and colorful, showing us a few aspects of Russian culture, and an even sweeter surprise for Babushka at the end. This also makes a great Easter story.

For those of us for whom spring just can't come quickly enough, And Then It's Spring, by Julie Fogliano, perfectly captures the waiting and wondering that happens every year -- we plant our seeds and it's still brown, brown, brown... we wonder, is it really going to come? But then it does! Erin Stead's lovely pastel colors capture both the browns that seem to last forever, and the greens that finally come at the end of all that waiting.

Speaking of waiting for spring, Spring for Sophie shows us this wondering and impatience from a child's perspective. Sophie keeps asking her parents how she will know when spring gets there. They tell her to use her senses to observe the changes: the squishiness of the ground, the sounds of the birds, the rain that falls which finally turns everything green, and then maybe at that point spring will finally be there. 

Old Bear, by Kevin Henkes, is a short book about a bear who hibernates through the winter and has a fantastical dream about every season -- from fall-colored fish to giant flowers in spring. But then at the end he waskes up to discover that it really is spring, and time for him to come out. Also by Kevin Henkes, see Egg for some more lovely spring pastel colors.

With a title like Separate Is Never Equal, it makes sense to assume this book is about segregation and the Civil Rights movement, and it is -- but it takes place several years before the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. This story is about Sylvia Mendez and her family's fight to desegregate schools in their region of California. At the time this story takes place, Hispanic children were sent to separate schools than white children in some places.

The general story is framed by the story of Sylvia Mendez's first day at her new (formerly "white") school. She is nervous, and one child tells her to go back to the Mexican school. When she comes home and tells her mother about it, her mother reminds her why they fought -- which takes us back to the story of the Mendezes' battle to allow their children to go to the school nearest their home -- not to the "Mexican school" which was not equal in funding or quality.

Despite the fact that Sylvia Mendez spoke perfect English and was American by citizenship, not Mexican, she was told that attending a separate school was simply "how it was done." No one gave them a reasonable answer to their questions of "Why?" But it eventually came out in the court case, quite clearly -- the school administrators simply believed that white students were superior to Hispanic ones.

It's a very interesting story, and it communicates the timeline and scope of events in a way that children can understand. The framing of the story helps to give a context to all of the legal processes -- in the end, Sylvia is able to attend her new school with a sense of pride because she knows that she and her family fought hard for that right. It's not surprising that her case received support from the NAACP, among other organizations, because this case helped open the door for national desegregation of schools. And I'd never heard of it or Sylvia Mendez before now -- I'm grateful to author/illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh for making it accessible in this way.

At the end of the book are some more detailed notes about the events in the story and some photos, as well as a glossary and bibliography.

Scrounged From: Amazon (Kindle)

Format: Kindle
Author/illustrator: Duncan Tonatiuh
Pages: 40
Content Advisory: The court case involves expressions of racist views of Hispanic people.

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We enjoyed reading another installment from the Messner/Neal duo, after reading Over and Under the Snow (see my review here). Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt includes beautiful, colorful artwork and tells the story of some of the things that go on in a garden over the course of a year. The text is spare and fairly poetic, and communicates facts about bugs, plants, and the food chain without a lot of technical terms. 

The book follows a girl and her Nana as they haul off dead plants and sow seeds in the spring, watch the vegetables ripen in the summer, and harvest and put the garden "to bed" in the autumn, and soon it rests under a blanket of snow for the winter. We're also introduced to some of the creatures that live in gardens: ladybugs, earth worms, pill bugs, and even garter snakes.

It's a great reminder that there's a lot going on in one little garden, and it's all interconnected -- even down in the dirt where we don't often see it.

Scrounged From: Our local library

Format: Hardcover
Author: Kate Messner
Illustrator: Christopher Silas Neal
Pages: 52
Content Advisory: None

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Destination: Planet Earth is a very thorough, colorful journey over our home planet -- landforms, earth science, geography. Each double-page spread includes a large illustration and small text blocks around it that cover details about each place or topic, such as mountains, the coastline, plate tectonics, volcanoes, biomes, etc. 

At the end there's a couple sections about pollution and some of the things we can do to help reduce waste. The book as a whole really makes you feel like an explorer!

(Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.)

Scrounged From: NetGalley

Format: Kindle
Author: Jo Nelson
Illustrator: Tom Clohosy Cole
Pages: 40
Content Advisory: None

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