DC Super Pets are fantastic easy readers. The text is clear, sentence structure is perfect for beginning readers, and they even use comic book style fonts and color to denote dialogue which helps beginning readers distinguish dialogue from the rest of the text AND adds a fun, comic book element. The illustrator, Art Baltazar has won the Eisner award and it shows in his illustrations for this book. The Eisner award is awarded to outstanding comic book artists each year. Backward Bowwow contains high gloss, bright illustrations that will draw kids into the stories.
In this title, Superman’s dog Krypto meets his evil counterpart, Bizarro Krypto. Bizzaro Krypto crash lands on Earth with the intent of reversing the relationship between dogs and humans. In Bizzaro World, the dogs are in charge and the humans are the pets, and Bizzaro Krypto is determined to make Earth the same way and it is up to Krypto to stop him. The title also has bonus material at the end including jokes and a glossary to define some of the higher level words called “Word Power”. This series has everything a beginning reader would want: superheroes, pets, great pictures and fun stories.
Posted by: Kelly
Books set in future dystopias are all the rage right now. Usually society has become degenerate and evil, with a veneer of civility and promise. Only angry hormonal teenagers who are in love with multiple people at once can see the cracks in the facade!
I liked the premise of this book. Fuel is unavailable. All the cars, and buses and trucks cannot run. The highways are empty. So people start walking and bicycling instead and they use the highways because it’s easiest. Can you imagine walking 22 miles to work? Bicycles become necessities and are in high demand.
This book is hysterically funny. It tells the tale of three fluffy bunny aliens who come to take over and eat everyone on Earth. Kevin and Joules are twins whose parents drop them at camp while they go to a SPAM cooking competition. Yep, SPAM. Camp is not what they expect, especially when the adults all get eaten by 7 foot tall bunnies who force the kids to eat sugar. The twins and their friend Nelson must save the day. Much hilarity ensues and then the world is safe once more. A great book that is perfect for reluctant readers.
It’s 1979 and in New York City, sixth-grader Miranda and her best friend Sal have parted ways, though they aren’t sure why except that it all seemed to start when that new boy Marcus punched Sal in the stomach. Miranda is saddened at this loss of a friendship, but she has other things on her mind, too. For instance, she is helping her mom prepare for an upcoming stint on the tv game show $20,000 Pyramid, she is reading and re-reading her favorite book A Wrinkle in Time to figure out time travel, and she is receiving strange notes addressed to her that seem to predict the future.
This was a great sci fi book for kids. Mike is told about 8 hours before they are leaving that he is going to go live with his parents and sister on Mars. At the last minute, his sister is left behind. Almost immediately, Mike realizes that something fishy is going on. Suddenly, his mom has an assistant that looks a lot more like a bodyguard. Then, after a very garbled message from his sister, he finds out that his parents are trying to sabotage the ship! With the help of a very weird girl, Mike may just figure out what is going on before all is lost.
The Allbright Academy is an elite private boarding school turning out perfect young adults — beautiful, smart, capable leaders of community and even the world. It’s such an honor to be invited to attend this school. Franny was actually not invited to attend, but her younger sister Zoe was and would only attend if Zoe’s twin J.D. and Zoe’s older sister Franny could go too. The school is for overachievers and Franny had always considered herself perfectly ordinary, and happily so. However, once ensconced in this fabulous opportunity of a school, eighth-grader Franny actually sees so many improvements, so many changes for the better in herself, her sister, her friend Cal and others. Family and friends who don’t attend Allbright, aren’t sure the personality changes they see really are for ‘the better’. Instead, they see fake, robot-type people in place of their loved ones. What’s happening? 
I have never been frightened by a book. When I was a toddler, I could look at picture books full of dragons and dinosaurs and scary witches without ever turning a hair. When I recommend picture books to parents at the library, I have to continually remind myself that not all little children are as blase as I was. 
What if your mother thought that she’d been abducted by aliens? What if she told everyone at work about it? Embarassing, right? But what if she was right? What if she HAD been abducted by aliens, and it was only a matter of time until those aliens not only abducted her again, but Took Over the World?
This is a wonderful story. It seems to take place in the late 1800’s but it is a different world. In this world, huge, luxury airships ply the skies buoyed by a gas called hydrium. Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora. He loves his airship and hopes to captain her himself one day. He is keeping watch one night when he sights a hot air balloon losing altitude. He is instrumental in rescuing the balloon and its occupant, a very sick man. While sitting beside the man in the infirmary, Matt tries to calm him by agreeing with him that he has also seen the beautiful winged creatures the man is talking about. The man dies but the next year a young lady passenger arrives on the Aurora in possession of the balloonist’s diary. The man was her grandfather and she has come on this trip in order to prove that he was not hallucinating ; that these creatures that he wrote about really exist. She enlists Matt’s help and then the unthinkable happens, the ship is attacked by air pirates and must make an emergency landing far from their route on an uncharted island. The island looks exactly like the drawing of the island in Kate’s grandfather’s journal. Their adventures are just beginning and the pirates do reappear. Kate and Matt turn out to be clever, brave, and intrepid. They do encounter one of the creatures which Kate thinks of as sweet but which turns out to be a very dangerous carnivore.
