The Great Picture Book Culling - Days 18, 19 and 20

Sorry for the bit of a backlog in the book reviewing - but we've been really busy here at Gratz Industries HQ. Alan gives all the great details (with pictures!) here so I'm going to jump right in to the last three days of reading.

Jo's favorite from all three days was Spring Cleaning - an old Sesame Street book by Pat Tornborg with art by Nancy W. Stevenson. It's classic Bert & Ernie. Bert is very efficiently going about their spring cleaning. Ernie has the best of intentions but he makes everything worse. As in this scene. . .
Ahhh - classic Sesame Street. Brings a smile to my face every time. :-)

My favorite of the bunch was Leonardo the Terrible Monster by Mo Willems. What a great book! Leonardo really is a terrible monster - terrible at being a monster, that is. He just can't seem to scare anyone, though he tries very hard.
Sorry about the appaling quality of the scan. The book has a lovely, generous trim size, but I can't get a full page on my scanner bed and there was bad light leakage all around. But you get the idea. . .

So Leonardo is a terrible monster, but he ends up being a wonderful friend. Speaking of Sesame Street (I know I wasn't just speaking of Sesame Street, but it was the last book I talked about) Mo Willems used to be a writer on the show and he really does the nice-but-not-sappy thing to perfection. I just love all of his books.

Finally - Alan's favorite of the bunch was There's No Such Thing as a Dragon by Jack Kent. Another really fun book - so weird in its matter-of-factness about this dragon. Billy wakes up and finds a small dragon in his room. No big deal. His mom tells him there's no such thing as dragons - so he ignores it. All day long he and his mother climb around it - no big deal - while it grows bigger and bigger. Finally it runs down the road after a bread truck, taking the house with it.
And then the mailman chases the house - not because the dragon is freaky, or because he feels like he needs to save the family, but because he has mail to deliver. And the text on the next page is priceless.
"When Mr. Bixbee came home for lunch, the first thing he noticed was that the house was gone. Luckily, one of the neighbors was able to tell him which way it went." Great stuff.

Jo also read Angelina Ballerina's Invitation to the Ballet - her favorite Angelina Ballerina book because it has lots of envelopes inside the book filled with letters, cards, tickets, etc. Diary of a Spider by Doreen Cronin with art by Harry Bliss was lots of fun. Pie in the Sky by Lois Ehlert has gorgeous cut-paper art showing a cherry tree (and all the birds and bugs that inhabit it) throughout the year. And there's a cherry pie recipe!

Read-a-thon status so far: 70 books read
Books culled so far: 14