The Most Beautiful Place in the World by Ann Cameron, drawings by Thomas B. Allen, 1988. Juan is a little boy living in the town of San Pablo in Guatemala. It’s not a very big town, but it is very busy. The town is on a lake with several other towns around it, but Juan has spent his whole life in San Pablo. Juan is from a poor family, although he doesn’t consider his grandmother poor because she owns her own house and is able to take in other relatives whenever they fall on hard times. He knows that his father was the caretaker of a big house in the town, but he abandoned him and his mother ..read more

Magdalena by Louisa R. Shotwell, illustrated by Lilian Obligado, 1971. Magdalena is switching classes at school. She’s happy about it because she found her old class too chaotic. She thinks she will be happier in her new class. Her friend in her current class at school, a boy named Saul, tells her that she must be an IGC, an Intellectually Gifted Child, in order to get transferred to that class because that class only takes gifted children. However, she is told that she will also have to wait a little for them to give her a desk in the room. When months go by without her being told that there ..read more

Grandma’s Records by Eric Velasquez, 2001. Every summer, a boy goes to visit his grandmother. He loves summers with his grandmother because she plays records from her record collection, teaches him to dance, and tells him stories about life in Puerto Rico, where she grew up. She instills a love of music in her grandson and uses it to share memories with him about his grandfather and their home town. Sometimes, she lets him choose records from her collection to play, complimenting him on his choices. The boy likes art, and he makes sketches based on the album covers. Then, his grandmother’s ..read more

When Aunt Lena Did the Rhumba by Eileen Kurtis-Kleinman, illustrated by Diane Greenseid, 1997. Sophie’s Aunt Lena loves music, dancing, movies, and theater, and she especially loves Broadway musicals. She goes to a musical matinee every Wednesday. After seeing a musical, she comes home, singing and dancing and acting out parts from the play she’s just seen. One particular Wednesday, when she’s acting out a particularly dramatic dance in the kitchen, she accidentally slips and sprains her ankle. She has to stay home and rest until her ankle gets better, which means that she won’t be able to g ..read more

Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Doghouse by Jean Lewis, illustrated by Richard Lowe, 1975, 1983. Scooby-Doo’s friends are building a new doghouse for him! They can’t decide what color to paint it, so they make half of it red and half of it blue. Scooby loves his new doghouse, at first, but then, something spooky happens! One night, Scooby comes running into the house, scared. While Scooby cringes under the covers of Shaggy’s bed, Shaggy gets a flashlight and goes outside to see what scared Scooby. When Shaggy looks in the doghouse, he sees a glowing pair of eyes, and then, something white runs p ..read more

Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion, pictures by Margaret Bloy Graham, 1956. Harry, like other dogs, hates baths! One day, when he finds out that his family is about to give him a bath, he decides to steal the scrub brush! He buries the scrubbing brush in the yard and runs off into the city to have some fun and get good and dirty! Normally, Harry is a white dog with black spots, but after a day playing with other dogs and running through construction areas in town, he’s so dirty that he looks like a black dog with white spots. Eventually, he gets tired and hungry and misses his family, so he g ..read more

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Clement Hurd, 1942. A little bunny tells his mother that he’s thinking about running away, but his mother assures him that, no matter where he goes or what he does, she would always come after him because he’s her little bunny, and she loves him. The pictures where the little bunny talks about all of his ideas for running away and evading his mother and where his mother explains what she would do to follow him are in black-and-white. However, there are large, full color pictures after each of these sections showing what would happen as t ..read more

Easter Stories for Children edited by Van B. Hooper, 1962. This book was published by Ideals, and if I remember right, is part of a series of holiday/seasonal books for children. (I don’t have a list of other books in the series, though.) It has short stories and poems about Easter. Largely, they’re not very religious in tone, tending to focus on fairies and the Easter bunny. I actually found all the references to fairies confusing because I never heard anybody talk about fairies being associated with Easter when I was a kid. On the religious side, there is one poem about prayer and a story ..read more

Lowly Worm Sniffy Book by Richard Scarry, 1978. Sniffy books or scratch-and-sniff books were a new development during the 1970s, and they remained popular through the mid-1980s, along with scratch-and-sniff stickers. This particular book features characters from Richard Scarry‘s Busytown series, especially Lowly Worm. The first part of the book has Lowly and his friend Huckle Cat looking at a sniffy book and teaching readers how to use the scratch-and-sniff parts of the picture. The rest of the book takes readers through the four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. In each season, the ..read more

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, 1969. A small caterpillar hatches out of an egg and is very hungry. Each day, the caterpillar goes out looking for food, finding different things to eat. Part of the book is a counting story, as the caterpillar eats different numbers of different types of fruit in different numbers. The format of this part of the book is really interesting because each of those pages isn’t a whole page but sections of pages that are different sizes, showing how the amount that the caterpillar eats increases each day. Also, there are real holes in the pages to show ..read more