The Korean Cinderella, by Shirley Climo (our review)

Calvin's rehash:
"It's about persons and ox and fruit. It's about Cinderella. They're mean to her. They make her do mean work. But the frog helps her fill the jug, the sparrows help her polish the rice, and the ox helps her pull out the weeds and then he eats them up. Then there's a band and then they're mad all over again. Then a man pulls out he shoe that was missing and he wants to marry her. There's a picture. They're getting married and they have a wedding."
"I love the book because I love the frog and I also love the ox."

My own thoughts? It's a fine book—the illustrations are beautiful and the writing is good. Why do I sound unenthusiastic? Really I'm not a big of most of the old fairy tales, particularly the Disney-fied ones. Cinderella is one of the books Calvin enjoys hearing again and again, and he also has the book on tape (a hold-over from his dad's childhood collection, and one that I'm certain I had, too, only on record), and at first that seemed like a grand thing. It is, after all, from the days of yore, and I tend to like vintage, eh? But the more I listen to the story, the more I am disappointed by it. Cinderella is gentle and kind and never loses her temper, and the story has a happy relatively ending, but it bothers me that she's entirely reliant on the good will of a fictional fairy godmother and an equally fictional prince charming to make it out of her oppressive life situation. Deductive moral of the story? You'd better have a fairy godmother and small feet or else you're up a creek. I'm sure I'm missing the forest for the trees—the moral of the story, after all, is that kindness is rewarded and evil loses out, right?—but something about the antiquated nature of the story line makes me cringe for girls everywhere.

That being said, I'll freely admit that I am likely over-thinking this, and I have no plans to snatch either the book or the tape out of Calvin's regular rotation. Some day we'll just have to discuss the other options that should have been available to Cinderella, like the doors opened by hard work put into a good education.

"Slowly, Slowly, Slowly," said the Sloth, by Eric Carle (our review)

This is another book to which we keep returning on our library visits. I think the first time we read it was around two years ago when Calvin was about a year and a half and was fascinated by the variety of animals.

Here's what he has to say about the book now:

"it's about a sloth who is slowly slowly. Every animal asked him 'why are you so quiet?' 'why are you so lazy?' and 'why are you so boring?' and at the end the jaguar says 'why are you so lazy?' and he thinks for a very long time and when you turn the page [the jaguar's] gone and the monkey thinks that the sloth is talking to him when he answers the jaguar's question slowly, slowly."

Calvin likes this book because he likes the sloth. The sloth is his favorite character, the jaguar is his favorite supporting character, and his favorite part of the book is when the jaguar asks the sloth "why are you so lazy?"

As for me, I'm actually not an Eric Carle fan. I do not like the "What Do You See?" books, or most of his other learning books, but in his rather vast library I can find a handful of titles that I don't mind reading, and this is one of them. I even like the pictures in this one, which amount to a parade of South American rainforest animals, and the use of vocabulary with a hint of comedic timing adds just the right amount of humor. That's why it has become a regular visitor in our house.

How Big is the World, by Britta Teckentrup (our review)

We picked this one up from the library simply because it looked sweet. In the end, I think it is one of my new favorite kids' books.

Here is what Calvin has to say about it:

"The book is about a world, and a mole, and a seagull. The mole asks everyone 'how big is the world'; He asks a spider, a mouse, and a horse, and a seagull, and a whale. The whale takes him and travels through colors and all kinds of stuff, and then Little Mole says 'I miss my family', 'then it's time to take you home' says Whale. Then Mole went home and told his papa that 'the world is as big as you want it to be', and then he fell asleep."

He says he likes the book because "it has the whale and [mole] thanks the whale", and that the whale is his favorite part. I like this book because the pictures are sweet and the story is simple, yet it carries a big message, most obviously told in the first exchange when, after Little Mole asks her "how big is the world", the spider answers "the world is as big as my web. My web is the world." How many humans suffer from exactly this same misconception?

Simple and sweet, yet powerful in its own way, albeit mostly for the parents doing the reading at this age, this book gets an A+ from us.

Zanzibar Road, by Niki Daly (review)

We love to look for books with animal characters at the library, and that's exactly what drew us to Zanzibar Road, with its cover of whimsically drawn African animals. As I flipped through it initially, before we brought it home for the week, I was pleased to see that it was broken into five different short story chapters, one of my favorite things about books like Frog and Toad.

As it turns out, the book is cute but pretty one dimensional; it doesn't have any of the richness that makes the Frog and Toad stories such classics, and I can't really say it's well-endowed in the arena of the plot. One might even call it vapid, but a little humor here and a little problem-solving there keeps me from fully condemning it as such.

Even after that raving review, I can't really say that I dislike the book, I just don't really enjoy it, and there are so many better ones out there. Calvin, on the other hand, seems to enjoy it just fine, and although I would say he's not nearly as engaged with the story as he is with others, we all enjoy a little light reading from time to time, and this book is definitely that, with a little enjoyable whimsy on the side.

I'm the Best Artist in the Ocean, by Kevin Sherry (review)

I can't really say this is a sequel to Sherry's I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean (if you've read it you'll know why), but it's the same players in the same tone and with the same kind of twist at the end. I'm the Best Artist in the Ocean seems, somehow, a little kinder (not that the first one is really a problem, mind you). I like the bright and simple illustrations in both books, and I also love that they're just silly books—no lessons of any kind to learn. Calvin loves the characters.