Two girls missing home find comfort in sharing their experiences. Read full book review >

Girls in sports! Read full book review >

A boy named Alec saves his family's huge spruce tree from being cut down as a Christmas tree. Read full book review >

"Once upon a time in the great city of Paris, near Rue Saint-Rustique in the 18th arrondissement, there lived a girl named Belle." Read full book review >

Robert Frost's eldest daughter's fictional reminiscence of her father's influential early years as a poet on their New Hampshire farm. Read full book review >

In lively prose well-matched by Gibbon's irrepressible images, Stone tells the story of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The breezy narrative visits Elizabeth at key moments in her youth: when she wondered why a visitor expressed regret that her baby sister was a girl; when she learned a widow would lose the farm she had worked on her whole life because her husband died and women couldn't own property; when she begged to continue her education. She married the abolitionist Henry Stanton, but kept her name along with his. A meeting with Lucretia Mott and other strong, like-minded women led to a much larger gathering at Seneca Falls, N.Y. There began the long battle—the end of which Elizabeth did not live to see—to win the right to vote. Gibbon uses pattern and line on white backgrounds to set off her figures and exaggerated gestures and expressions to give them energy. A fine introduction for very young readers to the woman and her key role in American history. (author's note, sources) (Picture book/biography. 5-9)Read full book review >

This upbeat but uneven book draws from the history of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and the famous song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." Carey (Milly and the Macy's Parade, 2002, etc.) takes Katie Casey, who in the famous song "was baseball mad," and imagines that she was recruited for the women's league, founded in 1943 when many professional male players joined the military. A scout recruits Katie, who is inept at stereotypical female pastimes like cooking but great at baseball, for the Kenosha Comets. On opening day, she hits a grand-slam to win the game. The inclusion of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," a song about a girl on a date rooting for "the boys," and the title word "pigtails," a term more associated with young children than professional athletes, both seem at odds with the book's role described in the author's note as a "tribute" to the "women" of the AAGPBL. But even more jarring is the style of illustration, which portrays all the players as slim and perky, unlike many of the real, often muscular, players. Accuracy is further undermined by the picture of a dark-skinned player being scouted, giving the impression that the AAGPBL had African-American players, which it did not. A more accurate and engaging picture book on the same subject is Dirt on Their Skirts: The Story of the Young Women Who Won the World Championship (2000), by Doreen Rappaport and Lyndall Callan, with illustrations by E.B. Lewis, that shows sturdy players and include photographs of them on the endpapers. (Picture book. 5-9)Read full book review >

Children trying to navigate these cheery concrete poems would be well-advised to follow the rhymes, because the words might read back and forth to evoke a game of "Catch"; up from the bottom, down from the top, or both ("Slide"); in spirals, swoops, or even from the center out ("Tic-Tac-Toe [A Battle Plan]"). Gibbons gives the verses plenty of elbowroom, setting them against spacious stretches of lawn, sand, wide, city streets or, sometimes, unadorned white space. Musician/songwriter Burg writes of happy times on ball fields, playgrounds, and beaches, in bedroom and back yard. If he closes with an invitation to "Connect the Dots" that may have children reaching for a pen or pencil, still the visual challenge of reading this poetry can be engrossing, and to judge from the popularity of Paul Janeczko's collection, A Poke in the I (2001), concrete poetry may be enjoying a renaissance. (Poetry. 7-10)Read full book review >