Solid early chapter book about finding new friends and recognizing your own talents. 

A counting book that is also a cookbook that is also about cross-cultural connection that is also about food in food pockets. I'm in! Great read aloud for the pre-k crowd, with simple math. 

Bizzare in a wonderful way, this could be a metaphor or...it could not be. Maybe its about depression, but maybe its just about a strange magical house where it rains indoors! If it is about depression, then the gentle message seems to be that having friends and community makes things better, which is a solid moral. But on the whole, this book is not terribly moralizing, and invites oyu to enjoy it just as it is: a strange little story without need for subtext. 

Fine, as far as it goes, but overly preachy and without anything stand-out or great. Plus it's too wordy as a read aloud. 

totally differnet and yet similarly brilliant to the Deep and Dark Blue. Love the ambiguous ending. 

Just gorgeous images of beautiful places, at exactly the right number of words (which is almost none) to share wit ha very teeny tiny, Kinda  wish it was a board book, actually. 

Delightfully strange

Solid as far as it goes, but a little too much written for parents rather than children. 

Very sweet book about the benefits of trying new things. I would read this with a classroom group, perhaps paired with Omu's Stew. 

This started slowly, and the narrative voice was unfamiliar enough that I had a hard time getting into it. But by the time I was a few chapters in, the unique storytelling style held my interest, and by halfway through I was extremely invested in every single one of the characters. This is magical realism at it's best, a situation where at any given point I couldn't tell you that it was magic, necessarily. A story about belonging and grief, and finding family, and about betrayal as well. And about inner dialogue and how that can sound inside other people's heads. I love it.