Harold & Hog Pretend for Real!

Harold & Hog Pretend for Real!

By Dan Santat

Harold the elephant and Hog are best friends.  They can’t wait to pretend to be Elephant and Piggie!  But Harold is too carefree to be Gerald, and Hog is to careful to be Piggie.  What will they do?  When they suddenly get the idea to switch roles, they start to feel like the real Elephant and Piggie!

From the Elephant & Piggie Like Reading series, this book is perfect for brand new readers!

The Princess In Black

The Princess In Black

By Shannon Hale and Dean Hale

Illustrated by LeUyen Pham

Princess Magnolia is prim and proper, as a princess should be.  She wears frilly pink dresses and takes tea with duchesses and never gets her hands dirty.  But Princess Magnolia has a secret: when the monster alarm rings, she knows she has to go.  She runs to her broom closet and quickly transforms into the Princess in Black!

Now, a princess/superhero needs a trusty steed.  Luckily, Princess Magnolia’s unicorn Frimplepants also has an alter-ego: the faithful Blacky.

The Princess in Black lives near the entrance to Monster Land.  Those mischievous monsters come out of their hole to try to eat local goats and cause all kinds of destruction. Luckily the Princess in Black and Blacky are ready to fight.  But can Princess Magnolia keep her identity a secret?

Girl power abounds in this series of stories for early readers.  Chapters are short and illustrations abound.   They also make great read-alouds.

We Are Growing!

We Are Growing!

By Laurie Keller

One of the new Elephant & Piggie Like Reading books, We Are Growing by Laurie Keller entices emerging readers to keep practicing their skills once they’ve finished all the books in their beloved Mo Willems series.

With high-impact, brightly coloured and cartoonish illustrations, simple text and larger than life sounds throughout (“Ping! Bam! Zap! Whee!), We Are Growing tells the story of a bunch of blades of grass, all of whom are growing up in their own special way.  Each one has a prominent trait that makes it unique from all the others.  One is the tallest, another is the curliest, another is the silliest, and so on.  

Just like kids, each blade of grass is distinct from the other and keeps growing like, well, a weed.

We Are Growing is engaging enough to do what it's designed to do: keep kids reading.

 

As Elephant says, “I love to read.”  “Me, too,” says Piggie.

Where Are You Going Baby Lincoln?

Where Are You Going Baby Lincoln?

By Kate DiCamillo

In the third installment in the Tales from Deckawoo Drive series, Baby Lincoln is feeling stifled by her older sister Eugenia.  Having been bossed around by the rule-bound Eugenia all her life, Baby Lincoln decides she must go on a “necessary journey”, although she does not know where.

Baby buys a train ticket to the only place she can afford – Fluxom --  and embarks.  On the train, she meets a series of people who change her life.  There’s a man in an enormous fur hat who introduces Baby to the joy of comics, a form of literature that Eugenia believes is a colossal waste of time.  There’s Sheila Marsden, who shares her bag of jellybeans and asks for Baby’s real name.  (Imagine – her real name is Lucille!)  And there’s little George, a young boy traveling alone.  Baby tells him a story and earns a friend for life.

Baby is learning that she doesn’t have to live life by Eugenia’s rules, but she desperately misses her sister.  Just as she starts to feel lonely, she arrives in Fluxom.  To her surprise, Eugenia is waiting for her!  Reunited, they return to Mercy Watson’s house for some toast with a great deal of butter on it.

Playful, fun and heartwarming, this story is a great read-aloud and perfect for new chapter book readers.