meh

What does this mean? Is it just pointing out that Americans don't get takeout for lunch on July 4th? What does the normal customer flow at the restaurant look like? I have no frame of reference here. Is the girl wrong? Right?

What on earth? This is an acid trip of a book. It's a series of images that appear different when turned upside-down. So it looks like a basket of fruit when the book is right-side-up, but if you turn it upside-down it kind of looks like a man. It kind of reminds me of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the painter who made lots of surreal portraits entirely out of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and other things.

It's okay. It's not bad, but it's not the best book ever. If you're trying to aggressively multicultural-ize your young child, this might help. It's certainly not offensive. The characters perform tasks that are pretty much broken down by traditional gender roles, though (father fixing car, mother cleaning, grandmother cooking, etc.).

It's a good example of a story where cleverness wins the day versus cleverness rather than versus fools. She's not particularly clever, though, she's just observant and surrounded by oblivious mice.

I think it's important for older siblings to understand that the reason that adults do that is because the younger sibling previously couldn't do those things. It's not that people are saying that there's anything inherently special about being able to sit up, but that there's something special about this person sitting up. And while it's important to pay as much attention to both siblings, just patronizing the older child and feigning interest in their ability to do things like sit up isn't really a good long term solution.

She says that her neighbor is like a grandma to her, and took care of her mother when her mother was little, and then took care of her when she was little, and all this girl does is hula hoop. How did her neighbor not know that she hula hoops? And how did her neighbor not tell her that she also hula hooped as a kid? And now I have semantic satiation with the phrase "hula hoop" which is like the goofiest phrase in the world.

Shells are cool, but these kids are basically obsessed with them. One of the last pages says, "When friends come in/to play on rainy days/we show them all our shells./We tell their names,/just where we found them,/and all about the day/the waves ran up to meet us." These children must be the most boring people to hang out with! "You want to look at my shells again??" No, no I don't want to look at your dang shells! Don't they like, play? Like normal children? "Shells... shells... would you like to look at my shells?"

The text is super boring. Despite the massive amount of text, there's no character development. The characters don't show emotion. There's nothing for the reader to identify with. "This happened." "Sometimes Henry does this." "On these other days, Henry does this." Just not interesting.

Meh. I guess it's cute, but there's really nothing to it. It's pretty dull.

The massive amount of text is rather overwhelming, though. In a spread, the right side might be a puppy, and nothing else. A fairly good picture of a puppy, a spaniel of some kind. Not photorealistic or anything, but definitely identifiable as a puppy. Cute. And the left side is just this wall of text. Given that it was published in 1938, we've come a long way as far as children's literature is concerned.