(4) K-3 Translated by Ineke Lenting. Illustrated by Annemarie van Haeringen. A hare is determined to throw a party that everyone will enjoy. His fellow forest friends, a hedgehog and an owl, are skeptical about including the local witch, who refuses the invitation and tries to end the party. The lengthy and predictable story concludes with the witch being drawn into the celebration. Ink and watercolor illustrations emphasize happy animals and a slightly scary witch.

Reviewer: Gail Hedges

(3) K-3 Illustrated by Dieter Schubert. Sophie discovers Carl the crocodile under her bed, and Carl is scared of Sophie. Originally published in 1981, this latest edition offers new green-and-yellow-tone illustrations capturing the pairs' playful escapades as Sophie demands that Carl perform tricks, make pancakes, and tell her stories. With an economy of text, this monster-under-the-bed book offers a lighthearted approach to bedtime fears.

Reviewer: Sheila M. Geraty

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Linde Faas. In preparation for King Lion's birthday, each of several animals donates a piece of meat. When Tarantula turns his back, his piece gets poached. His search for the "beef thief" is an amiable primer in animal diets (Giraffe: "Meat? Yuck! I eat leaves and branches"). The art is painterly and vibrant; too bad about the book's punctuation and grammatical gaffes.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) PS In this wordless Dutch import, highly detailed black line illustrations of a town include no color--until a young girl begins making chalk drawings of friendly-looking monsters who leap up and join her in her coloring. The townsfolk protest the color, which provides a little tension; kids will enjoy spotting the various people and pets who follow the girl and her monsters.

Reviewer: Jennifer M. Brabander

(4) PS "Yearning." "Hoping." "Expecting." "Marveling." One gerund describes each of twelve different stages of parenthood as experienced by one of twelve different birds; the journey concludes with "Letting go." Whether young readers will relate to this adult experience is doubtful, but what's certain is the strength of the artwork: the flouncy, feathery birds are in luminous chalky colors against black backdrops.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) K-3 Reluctant to leave the sea behind at the end of summer vacation, Mia fashions herself into a mermaid (with flippers found on the beach and her mother's old skirt) and searches her city for a proper mermaid habitat. Saturated, sweeping watercolors bolster the sense of Mia's imagination and invite the reader into the world she creates. An engaging journey for aspiring mermaids.

Reviewer: Hannah Rodgers Barnaby

(4) PS Each of twelve spreads is devoted to a classic children's song or nursery rhyme, from the familiar (the title song) to the relatively obscure ("Swam Swam over the Sea"). The lush illustrations, featuring toddlers and animals enacting the lyrics, set the cozy mood, but collectively, the rhymes don't add up to more than the sum of their parts. A CD is included.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) K-3 With Jesse Goossens. Tolman's distinctive art, saturated with bright colors, provides whimsical interpretations of the unusual facts she's collected about various animals: a caterpillar competes in the shot put ("caterpillars can throw their poop extremely well"); a polar bear paints an abstract self-portrait ("A polar bear is left-handed, as are most artists"). The facts are insubstantial, but it's amusing stuff, packaged beautifully. Ind.

Reviewer: Miriam Lang Budin

(3) K-3 In a series of twenty-seven oversize, wordless, and stunning picture book spreads, French illustrator Dematons celebrates her adopted country. Sure, you'll find a windmill or two and some tulips among the images, but what's most impressive here is the sheer amount of human drama, architectural detail, and intricacies of land- and cityscapes to be found in each picture. Brueghel would be proud.

Reviewer: Roger Sutton

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Ingrid Schubert & Dieter Schubert. In the singer-songwriter's first picture book, a mouse, bored with his life, stows away on a ship and has an encounter that makes him appreciate what he had. The lyrics don't quite work without the accompanying CD--the rhyming text's rhythms can be elusive, and some lines pointlessly repeat--but there's pleasure in Ian's punchy language and the verging-on-surreal illustrations. Sheet music included.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) PS The four stories collected here were originally published individually in 1999. Imaginative Lily and her trusty dog Trooper make their own seasonal fun as they picnic in the country, play at the beach, jump in leaf piles, and go skating and skiing. A brief line of text appears under pictures rendered in vibrant color with a childlike, finger-painted quality.

Reviewer: Carolyn Shute

(3) PS "Who has the most pointy nose?" "Who has the dirtiest hands?" Each of seven questions sits in a spread showing children and animals building with wood, getting costumed, and otherwise preparing for something. The glorious final spread, which depicts a homespun circus, reveals the surprising answers to the featured questions. As for the biggest bottom, it performs a balancing trick.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) K-3 A polar bear climbs down from what looks like an electricity-emitting cloud and journeys around a people-free world on foot and by sea (both swimming and on a rhinoceros's back), finally stopping to watch the night sky with a violin-playing raccoon. Like its similarly wordless, large-scale predecessor, The Tree House, this book is a dreamy, animal-filled visual fantasia inviting wonderment.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(4) PS Van Hout pairs each of twenty adjectives with a facing-page illustration of a fish embodying the word: the "sad" fish is all blue, the "curious" fish has bulging eyes, etc. The art--striking, brightly colored drawings against black backdrops--is noteworthy and stands out compared to the slight premise.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(4) PS Sixteen super-chunky pages describe Oliver and feature realistic illustrations of the solitary white egg...and nothing else. When Oliver rolls, readers must rotate the book to read the text, which concludes with a three-dimensional optical illusion (it enlists a ribbon) revealing Oliver's transformation into a chick. There's not much substance; this book's success hinges on the reader's appreciation for the gimmick.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) K-3 The wind whips an umbrella-clutching canine into the air. The dog journeys above the clouds, into the jungle, and so on; at moments of danger it is reliably saved by one animal or another who then ushers it to a safer setting. The art is so fully realized that the choice of wordlessness for this book was a good one.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(2) 4-6 In the 1944 Germany-occupied Netherlands, fifteen-year-old Michiel finds himself caught up in a dangerous situation involving an injured English pilot. Although the tone of this novel, originally published in the Netherlands in 1978, is straightforward and subdued, the devastating effects of the Occupation are cumulative, leaving readers with a strong sense of the courage necessary for survival during wartime.

Reviewer: Barbara Scotto | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2012

(3) K-3 Illustrated by Philip Hopman. In this zany tale, Tom cures his father's fear of animals by secretly training exotic pets to pose as pieces of furniture. When the trick comes to light, Dad admits the animals aren't so dangerous after all. A matter-of-fact narrative makes the preposterous seem possible, and the detailed tongue-in-cheek illustrations demonstrate how a polar bear, for example, can pretend to be an armchair.

Reviewer: Martha Sibert

(3) PS "Where are my striped underpants?...Where is my light blue shirt?" Readers can answer each of a boy's seven questions by poring over the book's double-page spreads featuring animals and children making merry with assorted garments. By this winsomely clever book's end, the once naked boy is fully clothed and marching the cast outdoors to play.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) K-3 A mouse shares his reliable cure for the blues: "Elephant soup!" The fastidious illustrations accompanying the recipe's steps ("Scrub gently") show a team of mice capturing a bemused-looking elephant who ultimately escapes the pot but nevertheless finds a way to cheer them up. Readers will delight in recognizing the tension between the narration's evenness and the illustrations' absurdity.

Reviewer: Nell Beram