Brown Bear, Brown Bear till the day I die.

This is like the "Baby Shark" of previous generations. Maybe it's cute once, but it will not get out of your head.

Message

Animals can be bizarre colors.

Adjective noun, adjective noun, what do you verb?

Just like its predecessor in the series, this book has no plot, and is a series of questions to a series of animals, phrased in exactly the same way, and is highly repetitive. I guess this one is for the parents who have burned out on "Brown Bear" and will be satisfied with a slight variation for a while.

Message

Different animals make different noises.

More like Sir Barely-Appearing-In-This-Book.

There's no realistic usage of mathematics in this. There's no engineering or practical application of anything. It feels like the author had an ending in mind, maybe just the title of the book, and wanted to write something based on Euler characteristics, so she had to make some kind of weird, contrived situation for them to derive Euler characteristics on their own. Everything they do is just super lucky. I don't know who's going to enjoy this book. People who are really gung-ho about math, I guess.

Message

Knowing mathematics will help you become the king? Enjoying math is mandatory.

Or maybe "moonshine" is like "moonlight."

Maybe the father should have been clearer. Maybe she should have an additional adult helping take care of her. And where are Thomas's parents? Why do they let him drive around the island on his bicycle? Couldn't she go stay with them? This is just a weird book, and I'm not sure how applicable the message is to children nowadays.

Message

Lying can cause very naive people to get killed.

Not sure whether I'd rather catch the wind or inherit it.

It's just this misunderstanding between friends. She thinks Ezel is telling her she can't do something, when he's really trying to suggest that they could dance together without saying it. And it turns out she dances with him because he's her friend and she doesn't want other people being mean to him. She sticks up for him and does the right thing.

Message

Stick up for your friends.

Mildly interesting.

It's the standard 'older siblings mean to younger sibling, younger sibling wins in the end' story that's all over the world, like Cinderella from Europe or Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters from Africa. It's unclear why RFG's father lets her sisters treat her so terribly. And in Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, at least the younger daughter gets tested on her personality, and not her weird ability to see invisible things. As usual, the younger girl gets rewarded by marrying the best guy because that's what girls want.

Message

Don't be haughty and don't lie to people? Or, make sure you can see invisible things.

Unrealistic, or highly unusual, memory loss.

She seems to remember things that are important to the granddaughter. Which is rather inconsistent with the forms of memory loss that I'm familiar with. She forgets that the granddaughters name is Lucy, not Luciano (which is Little Mamá's name). Why would she call someone else by her own name? Maybe it's Lucy's mother's name, too? I feel like I have to make a lot of excuses for this book to make sense.

Message

When you lose your memory as you age, you lose things kind of randomly and sporadically.

Forced rhymes, cliché story.

I was disappointed by this book. I was hoping based on the summary that it would be more interesting, rather than just, 'Hey these people met and fell in love and then they're happy.' It wasn't clever. It wasn't inventive. It was pretty run-of-the-mill. A good message, but not interesting enough to hold my attention.

Message

Don't judge people by their appearance.

Missed opportunity is more dramatic than actual reformation.

"The Hundred Dresses" is almost identical in storyline to "Each Kindness." All the kids make fun of a poor girl, and at the end, the girl moves away and the main character is depressed by what happened. Basically, the main characters need to see someone else suffer in order to grow, and they don't realize the opportunity they had until it's gone.

Message

Be nice to people for niceness's sake. Or, you never realize how much of a jerk you were until after the fact.

Not as good as it probably used to be.

This book was probably great for its time (1972). I think it's a bit outdated in execution, although the message still resonates today. This book was at the beginning of teaching people about the topic, and it deserves some historical credit for that.

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There's nothing wrong with boys wanting dolls.