(4) 1-3 Ready-for-Chapters: Third-Grade Detectives series. Illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca. In these two installments, the members of Mr. Merlin's class use their logic skills, their ability to crack a code, and the help of a police lab to solve a pair of mysteries. One case involves food poisoning; the other a run-over bicycle. The characters are minimally developed and the mysteries themselves not especially interesting, but readers will enjoy trying to solve the mysteries and learning a new code. [Review covers these Ready-for-Chapters: Third-Grade Detectives titles: The Case of the Dirty Clue and The Secret of the Green Skin.]

Reviewer: Susan Dove Lempke

(4) 1-3 Ready-for-Chapters: Third-Grade Detectives series. Illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca. In these two installments, the members of Mr. Merlin's class use their logic skills, their ability to crack a code, and the help of a police lab to solve a pair of mysteries. One case involves food poisoning; the other a run-over bicycle. The characters are minimally developed and the mysteries themselves not especially interesting, but readers will enjoy trying to solve the mysteries and learning a new code. [Review covers these Ready-for-Chapters: Third-Grade Detectives titles: The Case of the Dirty Clue and The Secret of the Green Skin.]

Reviewer: Susan Dove Lempke

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca. At the young narrator's urging, her grandmother joins her at an after-hours zoo party and has a blast. Readers who surrender to this fantasy--no wondering why the girl and granny are the only humans at the party, or how the girl learned of it--will find much to enjoy in the snappy rhymes and images of the ample-figured yet sprightly granny cutting a rug.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca. The regular school bus is in the repair shop, and the substitute bus is too small, so driver Mr. Mathers stuffs the seventy-six students under seats, in overhead shelves, etc. Some readers will enjoy testing their addition and subtraction skills as Mathers (pun intended) loads and discharges kids; others may lose patience with keeping count. The crowded cartoon illustrations feature scared-looking children clinging to the roof of a tottery bus.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca. Pete and Patti watch as a seismosaurus shrinks gradually to one-trillionth its original size. On each double-page spread, the dinosaur's new, smaller size is expressed numerically as a fraction and as a decimal or a power of ten, and visually through comparisons to objects, such as a cricket or amoeba, some of which won't be familiar to young readers. At times, the many speech bubbles and text boxes clutter the cartoon-style illustrations.

Reviewer: Tanya D. Auger

(3) K-3 Illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca. A pedagogically sound approach to introducing number sense, this engaging picture book's use of a single unit--peas--allows for consistent comparisons of numbers: a lone pea rests on a plate; a million peas cover a tabletop; a billion peas flood a house and pour into the yard. Silly asides ("Looks like it snowed peas"), large-number science facts, and Murdocca's comical illustrations add to the book's appeal.

Reviewer: Tanya D. Auger

(2) 4-6 Illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca. When fifth-grader Cara, a creative loner, publishes her own newspaper and editorializes on the absence of teaching in her classroom, she evolves into a popular editor while her teacher returns to the kind of motivating teacher he used to be. The text flows effortlessly yet explores thought-provoking issues such as intellectual freedom that are likely to engender further exploration.

Reviewer: Elizabeth S. Watson | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 1999