Bridget Heos

In reviewing this book, I wish to focus mostly on accessibility. In this regard, this book does a poor job of living up to accessibility standards. The cover is very inviting, promising the reader some intriguing information about the gruesome subject of forensic science. After all, doesn't everyone love a good gory story about the underbelly of human behavior? A quick look at television ratings can answer that question fairly definitively. Anyway, the book fails to deliver effectively on show more the subject of accessibility based on several factors. Though there is a table of contents, the chapters are not organized or separated by narratives leading to a reader finding an interesting photo or caption and then hunting, often for a long time, for where the narrative supporting this picture begins. The chapters do offer fun figurative titles but that is about it as they don't really expound on this with what I like to call "flavor text." The book has a decent glossary but the words of the glossary are not in bold print or indicated in any way in the narrative so that the reader has no clue that the words are defined later in the book. There is no pronunciation guide given so, if you don't already understand how to say the word, you are just out of luck which begs the question of why a glossary is included at all. There are no sidebars. The inserts between chapters are indistinguishable from the rest of the narrative other than their pages are black with stripes around the border. The bibliography is divided into primary and secondary sources but, most of the sources are long URLs that would be almost impossible to type in manually and so unless you are buying this as an eBook are almost useless in further research. In a book titled "Blood, Bullets and Bones" as morbid as it may sound, one would expect to find photos or drawings of everything in the title. However, there is almost no blood, no bullets and only one instance of bones shown. The photos are usually stock photos of criminals or the investigators who caught them with the occasional victim thrown in. Overall using several metrics to evaluate the bibliography, photos, and captions as well as the index , sidebars or lack thereof and notes, this book falls far short of the mark. For a book that promises an exotic delicacy dish of the wild and the weird in human behavior, the reader is delivered instead, a gas station microwave sandwich of the mundane and semi interesting that is loaded with artificial ingredients. show less

Brother to two stegosauruses, our eponymous hero - a stegothesaurus - was a word-loving dinosaur, one who never used one description when he could use three. Then one day he met an allosaurus, or rather, an allothesaurus, and the two bonded over their shared loved of words. Until, that is, our hero learned that the allothesaurus gained her vocabulary skills from EATING a stegothesaurus...

I appreciated both the amusing dialogue and the endearing word-love in Stegothesaurus, and got quite a show more chuckle from the conclusion, in which our dinosaur hero can suddenly only think of one word. The illustrations by T.L. McBeth, who makes his picture-book debut here, are colorful and cute, in a cartoon-like way, and capture the humor of author Bridget Heos' story quite well. Recommended to dinosaur and/or word-loving young children, and to anyone looking for new picture-books with an oddball sense of humor. show less

There are a lot of first day of school books, going to a new school books, and other general school books. But I've only got two (very old) books that are younger than kindergarten. Which is weird, because so many kids go to daycare and/or preschool now!

When I think of Bridget Heos, I'm more likely to think of laugh-out-loud funny (and mustaches), but this book is adorably sweet. A curly-haired fairy wakes up in a flower, ready to start school for the first time. She and the other children show more fly with their parents (or on the schoolbird) and have a lovely day meeting new friends, having fairy snacks, playing, and reading stories.

Of course this is an imaginative approach - preschoolers won't really expect to be able to clean up with a whisk of a wand, nap in a tree under flower petals, or tightrope walk on a spiderweb. But the general activities will be familiar and the cozy approach will comfort nervous little ones and make them giggle.

Sara Not's illustrations are adorably sweet; there are lots of colorful flowers, miniature details, and a nice variety of skin tones and body types among the fairies. The main fairy character is biracial, shown at the end with her curly-haired, darker skinned father and blonde, white fairy mother.

Verdict: A delightful addition to new school books, perfect for the littlest ones starting preschool, this fairy tale will be a delightful read at any time of the year.

ISBN: 9781328715593; Published 2018 by Clarion; Borrowed from another library in my consortium show less

When Billy is born with a mustache, his parents learn that this could be either bad or good, depending on what kind of mustache it turns out to be. At first all seems well, as Billy devotes himself to benevolent actions, from protecting his cattle to fighting crime. But then his mustache begins to curl at the ends, and his parents' worst fears seems to be realized. Is Billy destined for villainy...?

An amusing look at the vacillating moods of childhood, Mustache Baby uses an unusual lens - show more the mustache - as a way of exploring both the unconscious and conscious trouble that babies and toddlers get themselves into. Having seen this used as a story-hour selection here at work, I can attest to the fact that its humorous narrative and colorful, appealing illustrations work very well to keep young children entertained. Recommended to anyone looking for stories for the younger picture-book set that have a slightly offbeat sense of humor. show less