Stephanie St. Pierre

This is a pop up book about counting. It has a poem counting down from 10 to 1 as Lassie looses sheep in various ways, and then at the very end, back to 10 as she finds them all.

Like you would expect for a pop up book, production value is good. Also, as you would expect for a pop up book meant for small children (a counting book!), this gets tore up. It has some lift the flap activities, and then it has pop ups that are not meant to be touched.

There are 12 pages - one for loosing each sheep, and then a two page spread for finding all the sheep at the very end.

Art style, presentation, and all is intended as a run of the mill counting book for little kids. It's not an artist's rendition and not meant for adults. It was released when fancy pop up books with an artistic slant were a trend, but it's really truly just a plain vanilla kids counting book with simple illustrations. Production value is higher than art and writing.… (more)

The Adventures with Barbie series was originally published in the early 90's and has since been reissued in a variety of countries with various reading orders - sometimes under the same names but not always. In Australia, this series was reissued as Barbie Sweethearts and featured covers with Barbie dolls. The series follows Barbie on her every day adventures featuring recurring characters, different careers, new places and friends and some mysteries. Barbie always has a smile and is always willing to lend a hand, making this a perfect series for tween readers.

In Wildlife Rescue Barbie, Ken and Kira go to Africa to photograph the endangered animals for a charity calendar but on their first night they run into trouble from poachers. Jim, their guide, explains that the poachers hunt the local wildlife, in particularly targeting elephants for the ivory that their tusks are made of. The gang see first hand how this affects the elephant families when they find a baby elephant wander into their camp - dusty, injured and hungry. When the poachers won't stop coming after the baby elephant, Barbie comes up with a plan to poach the poachers.

I enjoyed this one. It's a bit more intense than the others in the series. It reminded me of Holiday in the Wild on Netflix (great film btw) - but without the romance and humour. Well it had a little humour I guess. My rating 3 stars. Target audience, 4 stars.… (more)