(2) PS Illustrated by Mick Wiggins. This companion to Trucks Roll! (and others) introduces trains' characteristics and typical journeys. Rhythmic, rhyming text smoothly incorporates terminology and technical details, while an energetic refrain--"Steam engine, / gas engine, / electric engine too. / Chooka-chooka! Vroom zoom! / Hssss! Whoo-oo-whoo!"--provides kid-pleasing opportunities for participation. Wiggins's posterlike digital illustrations of city scenes, dramatic natural landscapes, and in-station vignettes reward close observation with a few fantastical surprises.

Reviewer: Elissa Gershowitz | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2019

(2) PS Illustrated by Mick Wiggins. This companion to Trucks Roll! and Planes Fly! introduces children to tugboats, sailboats, canoes, steamboats, and more. The buoyant rhymes are factually informative--packed as they are with maritime terminology--and giddily unpredictable. Some lines play up poetic imagery; others are child-pleasingly jocular or mind-expanding. The digital, sun-bathed illustrations have the look of vintage European travel posters.

Reviewer: Elissa Gershowitz | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2015

(2) 4-6 Poets Lewis and Lyon here give voice to a cross-section of the 250,000 participants of the 1963 March on Washington: from first grader Ruby May Hollingsworth and Aki Kimura, a Japanese American sent to an internment camp during WWII, to Coretta Scott King. Many fine works on the civil rights movement are available; this adds the power of poetic imagination. Reading list, websites. Bib., ind.

Reviewer: Dean Schneider | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2014

(3) K-3 Illustrated by August Hall. Lyon leads readers through the four seasons, using the forest as both lens and backdrop for the changes that come with each phase of the year. The gentle, poetic text draws in readers and encourages them to inhabit and observe the forest, while Hall's textured, glowing digital art echoes the sense of wonder at entering serene woods.

Reviewer: Hannah Rodgers Barnaby

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Mick Wiggins. Lyon packs an impressive dose of aeronautical vocabulary into her succinct survey of "bi-planes / tri-planes / gotta-love-the-sky planes..." Segueing into planes' uses and "your" possible journey, Lyon hints at science ("air holds you") and outlines an experience that Wiggins brings to life using sweeping spreads, saturated colors, and clear compositions. Strategic generalizations and wealth of significant detail add up to a winning introduction.

Reviewer: Joanna Rudge Long | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2013

(2) YA Sixteen-year-old Jules's baby, Zoe, is the center of her world. No one else gets it, not her mom, not her best friend, not the doctors who tell her an ectopic pregnancy can't result in a baby. Through the first-person narrative, which shifts between before and after Zoe, Lyon portrays a troubled girl from deep inside, maintaining the tight focus of Jules's distorted perspective throughout.

Reviewer: Lauren Adams | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2012

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Christopher Cardinale. The narrator of this fictionalized tale lives in Kentucky “in a coal company house on coal company land…[Pa] says the company owns us sure as sunrise.” When company thugs harass the family, Ma, unfazed, scribbles words for the song that would become the union anthem. Lyon’s text captures the family’s sympathetic plight while Cardinale’s woodcuts display drama and energy. Author’s note. Bib.

Reviewer: Jonathan Hunt | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2012

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Katherine Tillotson. Lyon celebrates the essence of life itself in a lyrical poem about the water cycle. In sweeping, digitally rendered art resembling watercolor and collage, Tillotson creates luxuriant ocean swirls and pelting streaks of rain. It's a familiar subject but a vital one, to which author and illustrator bring a passion and artistry that give it the power of story.

Reviewer: Joanna Rudge Long | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2011

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Lynne Avril. Plainspoken text and sunny mixed-media illustrations present the confusing world of a child with double vision. Ginny's doctor outfits her with an eye patch ("for a while"): "So Ginny became a Kindergarten Pirate who could...read and read and read." Easygoing pictures in cheerful colors simultaneously depict a warm, inviting classroom and the chaos seen through Ginny's eyes.

Reviewer: Lauren Adams | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2010

(3) K-3 Illustrated by Stephanie Anderson. Supportive community members work together to build a home for a struggling mother and daughter. The illustrations capture not only the beauty of the workers of different races united, but also the realities of what goes into building a house from the ground up. The story, based on the author's experience with the Women's Build program, is thought provoking without being didactic.

Reviewer: Henrietta M. Smith

(3) PS Illustrated by Peter Catalanotto. "Everything nests--Shh shh / Everything rests--Shh shh." In this gentle bedtime lullaby, the top two-thirds of the realistic watercolor and gouache illustrations show a tot playing with her parents while getting ready for bed. The bottom third, in nighttime shades of blue, depicts animals bedding down for the night. Music to accompany the text is included.

Reviewer: Patricia Riley

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Stephen Gammell. The narrator recounts two of her elderly neighbor's stories. The first tells how he followed a star that fell from the sky. The second is about coming upon the end of a rainbow. Lyon's words are spare, never florid, for an elegantly powerful effect with silence built in. Gammell's art effectively intersperses grays with exuberant rainbow shades.

Reviewer: Susan Dove Lempke | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2008

(2) PS Illustrated by Craig Frazier. Solid, up-to-date information is leavened with lively verse and a touch of whimsy. The text celebrates trucks' features, from cabs to pistons, and diverse cargoes ("books and bulldozers, / dolls and clocks"). Frazier plays with scale--either the cargoes are gigantic or the trucks are toys--to depict the chunky vehicles. This is a graphically handsome addition to a popular genre.

Reviewer: Joanna Rudge Long | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2007

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Peter Catalanotto. After her older brother gets her in trouble with their mother, a girl fantasizes her revenge. What's Lyon's psychologically astute masterstroke? The girl directs her rage ("When you get little and I get big…") not at her brother but at a safer target: her defenseless doll. Catalanotto doesn't always manage facial expressions, but his painterly illustrations get everything else right.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(2) YA Living in a secretive southern family in the 1950s, Sonny, thirteen, is still trying to make sense of an incident that occurred when he was six (his mother heaved a plate at his father, who left the next morning). His attempts to grapple with the issues of race and sexuality bring about major repercussions. This lively novel crackles with wit as it sensitively explores Sonny's world.

Reviewer: Barbara Scotto | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2004

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Stephanie Anderson. An age-old process is the subject of a story in which sheep contribute wool to the creator of a textile picture of the flock. The sheep farmer's anonymity (she's referred to only as "the weaver") makes the process seem once-removed from reality, and the story has a drifting quality. Watercolor illustrations on a beginning page show the sheep morphing into the woven picture.

Reviewer: Paula M. Cairo

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Peter Catalanotto. In 1944, Helen Martini started the first nursery at the Bronx Zoo, becoming a "mother" to a host of baby animals. She increased the newborns' chances of survival and established sturdy lines of animals able to reproduce in captivity. Catalanotto employs his trademark action sequences of motion-picturelike stills in watercolors and charcoals. An afterword explains the author's interest in Martini.

Reviewer: Betty Carter | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2003

(2) 4-6 Gina couldn't be more surprised to discover that her ultra-rational father is seeing a psychic than if she found out he was turning into a bear--which, coincidentally, is what's happening to Jamie's father. Two parallel stories of family secrets--one set in modern-day Ohio, the other in a lush fairy-tale woods--gradually swirl together to form an intriguing puzzle. Even for readers not swayed by New Age beliefs, it's easy to get caught up in Lyon's fluid vision of reality.

Reviewer: Christine M. Heppermann | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2002

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Irene Trivas. In this well-crafted picture book, a tornado approaches, hits, and scatters Nick's family's less well-crafted trailer, with his baby sister inside. The grownups search frantically for Becky under the debris, but it's Nick who finally finds her miraculously unharmed. Lyon's telling--based, apparently, on a true story--has the spareness and vividness of poetry. The watercolors portray a family and neighborhood united by calamity and joy.

Reviewer: Martha V. Parravano | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2000

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Peter Catalanotto. A free verse poem strives to evoke the imaginative and world-widening possibilities of a story by comparing a book to "a house / that is all windows and doors," "a chest / that keeps the heart's treasure," and "a farm / its field sown with words." Softly blurred watercolors featuring a young girl mirror the text literally and extend it metaphorically. While somewhat contrived and not a real grabber, this is a quiet picture book celebration of the pleasures of reading.

Reviewer: Carolyn Shute