Here are some fun stories that just beg to be read to little ones at bedtime.

The Polar Express Shadow Book – Author: Melissa Morgan; Illustrator: Heidi Cho

Follow the Polar Express train on its way to the North Pole. Dim the lights because the illustrations in this book are on transparencies and are designed to work as a shadow slide show on your wall when shone with a flashlight. Really cool idea.

The Whole Green World — Author: Tony Johnston; Illustrator: Elisa Kleven

This one can’t be read. It has to be sung, like a lullaby. It tells the story of a little girl that discovers the whole green world when she puts her shoes on and finds some seeds. A good story about spring time, too.

Too Many Frogs — Author: Sandy Asher; Illustrator: Keith Graves

The story of Rabbit, who has an orderly and quiet evening routine to get him to bed. He doesn’t like fuss, he doesn’t like clutter, but he does like to read. One night, as he settles in to read his story, Froggie shows up at door and asks to listen to the story. Right after he has a messy snack, of course. Pretty soon, Froggie starts to show up every night for story time, much to Rabbit’s annoyance. Adorable illustrations.

Hey, Mama Goose – Author: Jane Breskin Zalben; Illustrator: Emilie Chollat

The little old woman who lives in a shoe decides she can’t raise all her children in a shoe, so she moves into the cottage inhabited by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Which leads Snow White to have to find another place to stay, which leads her to Rapunzel. One by one, each fairy tale character is displaced and moves in on another fairy tale character’s dwelling. Good to read to kids that know most of their fairy tale characters.

What’s With This Room? — Tom Lichtenheld

“Look at this room, it’s in such distress, you’d have to clean it up just to call it a mess!” A really cute story about parents trying to get their son to clean up his room as the son tries to explain why it shouldn’t be cleaned. Illustrated very well.

Giraffes Can’t Dance — Author: Giles Andreae; Illustrator: Guy Parker-Rose

Gerald is a giraffe that wishes he could dance, but all he can do it stumble over his long legs. When he attends the African Jungle Dance, where all the other animals in the jungle dance so well, he’s booed off the dance floor because he can’t dance. Ashamed, he heads deeper into the jungle where a cricket teaches him that anyone can dance if they hear the right music to move them. Very well-illustrated, and a clever story.

I’ve seen the famous movie adaptation of The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland. I’ve seen various spoofs of the story in television skits and and musical stage productions. I’ve thumbed through various copies of the story that come in and out of the library I work at. I’ve read Wicked. But I have never actually read L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.

So when I saw this absolutely gorgeous picture book for all ages sitting on the new books display at the library, I decided to take it and read it through. Wow, Santore’s illustrations are stunning. The colors and the drawing are just beautiful. But right off the start, from the cover alone, you notice a few things that are different from what you’ve come to expect from everything you’ve seen about The Wizard of Oz.

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Any of you out there with teenaged daughters? Worried about them engaging in unsafe sex? Well, get them a copy of this book and make them read the first quarter. They don’t even have to finish it, the first 50 pages will be enough to put them on the right path. Not only will they get an excellent representation of what life as a young, single mother is like, they’ll be horrified to see what I’m taking to be a pretty accurate description of life “on the dole”.

This is a novel with a premise that is so depressing, yet at times it was so comical and light. Meet the protagonists, Lucy and Lish, two women living in Have-A-Life public housing in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Yes, that is what it’s called. Its tenants have alternate names for their housing, everything from Have-A-Life? Have-A-Light? and Have-A-Laugh?, which you have to admit is pretty amusing and being able to laugh at it probably makes them feel a little better about their living situations. Anyway, Have-A-Life is the most oddly-named government-funded housing for young, single mothers on welfare, and man… does it ever sounds like it sucks to live there. I would never, not in a million years, wish this sort of living arrangement on anyone I know.

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Anita over at It’s All About The Book was tagged with a reading meme. Rather than tagging people individually, she’s opened it up to whoever wants to do it with the promise that she’ll leave comments all over that person’s blog. Now, Anita, as much as I love comments, I won’t hold you to that promise, but I will do the meme, because I think it’s interesting. And because my sister also tagged me with this meme a while back, but for some reason I can’t find it on any of my blogs though I remember doing it. Or thinking about it enough that I’ve tricked myself into thinking I did it. Hmmm. Well, here goes…

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This was a great story to read. It is witty, smartly-crafted, and a clever contemporary reimagining of the myths of Odysseus and Penelope. The story is told from the points of view of Penelope and her twelve doomed maids and in various formats of prose, poetry and song. Penelope always speaks in the first person, sometimes in the present from Hades’ underworld, and at other times in the past as she remembers her time on Earth. The twelve maids tell their parts of the story through songs, poems, and fun things like mock court trials (they sue Odysseus for their murders) and lectures (they interpret the events of their lives for university students). This method works very well for the story and makes the reading lively and quite humorous. I was impressed with Atwood’s creativity. I was impressed with this story altogether.

This is the story of Penelope’s childhood and marriage to Odysseus. She gets married at the young age of fifteen and joins her new husband on the island of Ithaca. Just barely are they into their married lives together when he leaves because of what else? Another woman. (more…)

Initially, I started listening to this audiobook out of my curiosity to know whether Colin Farrell could actually speak for a long period of time without swearing. He can, and I was actually impressed with his vocal performance.

I had heard some good things about the movie version of this novel (which also stars Farrell and another reader in the story, Dallas Roberts), but I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I thought I’d read the book before watching it. And, as I’d just recently gotten an iPod, I decided this novel could be the first audiobook I listened to on it.

I was surprised by how much I liked it. The readers were all very good. None of their readings were monotonous or flat. It truly was more of a vocal performance than a simple reading, which made it easy to listen to for a long period of time; and, considering this (abridged) audiobook totalled more than 7 hours, this is a very good thing. (more…)

My husband bought me an iPod video recently, and one of the really nice features is the ability to listen to audiobooks. I first time I can remember listening to an audiobook was when I was teaching about 5 years ago, and my classes did a novel study on Lois Lowry’s The Giver. The school I was teaching at didn’t have enough copies of the book to assign to each student, so every week I would spend 45 minutes of an hour-long class reading the novel aloud, and when you have 3 classes back-to-back that you have to read aloud to, your voice and throat suffers for it. So I got the audiobook version of The Giver on CD and played it for them instead. It saved my voice, but it wasn’t much consolation as the voice actor that read the story wasn’t very good and I could have done a better job than he did.

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After thinking about it for a while, I’ve decided to move Kristina’s Book Blog from Blogger to WordPress. What I like about WordPress is that I can sort my reviews into various categories, which is very useful for a book blog. Now if a reader wants to see what children’s books I’ve read, but don’t care to spend time sifting through the archives and reviews of other genres to find them, they can click on the Children’s Books category and see all those reviews in one glance. This was the number one reason for switching. (more…)

The choice for this month’s book club read is The Summer of My Amazing Luck, by Canadian writer Miriam Toews. Being Canadian, it’s hard for me to admit this, but I still think of Canadian writing as boring and my first instinct is to run away. Yes, even with such amazing novels as Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and highly successful writers like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro to claim as Canada’s own, I still hesitate to read Canadian fiction. Particularly writers from the Prairies, which is where Miriam Toews comes from. I think it’s because it makes me think of the Canadian Literature courses I was required to take in University as part of my English major degree. Those were 2 semesters of the most difficult reading I’ve ever forced upon myself. They got better once we reached modern era choices, but not by much and the boredom and pain of it all still sears in my brain.

But I will give it my best try, and I may even (and hope to) be pleasantly surprised.