alizontheamazon's reviews
1350 reviews

On the day of the annual school pet show, Ernest shows up with his pet crocodile and spends the rest of the day trying to prove to everyone, but most especially Cindy-Lou, that his crocodile is very well-trained and does NOT bite.

I thought it had a funny ending, in which the crocodile swallows Cindy-Lou whole ("see he doesn't bite...he swallows his food whole"), but this might scare younger children. You have to be older to see the humor in the situation.

The main character lamantes the fact that her grandma is different from other grandmas. She attempts to give her a makeover, but sees that once she's changed who her grandma is on the outside, it makes her sad on the inside. This is a great book about acceptance. The fact that the girl's gram is a witch is never stated out right, but kids will be able to tell from the very obvious depiction of her. This is not a strictly for Halloween book, but has Halloween like themes.

This is a pretty generic story about standing up for what you feel is right and standing up for yourself in general. The illustrations are really lacking and don't add much to the story at all. There is a lot of white space and the book just felt...empty.

This was an amusing tale of a gang of pirates that comes ashore to bury their treasure and runs into a gang of cowboys. Because they both speak different "languages" (aka use different slang terms) neither group can understand the other until a pirate/cowboy comes to town to translate.

The story is amusing and I can see it being fun to boys who like pirates or cowboys or both, but it's really random and out there. And I thought it was kind of a weird turn how they all end up taking a bath in the end.

In this sort of Cinderella tale, the main character goes next door to retrieve a ball of yarn she's dropped into the neighbor's yard. The neighbor asks her to do a series of tasks, which the girl completes, but not the way the woman wants her to. Instead of smashing all the dishes in the kitchen, the girl cleans them and makes the kitchen nice. After all is said and done, the woman tells the girl to bath in two different pools outside. This makes her extremely beautiful. But when her stepsisters does the same thing, she does EXACTLY what the woman tells her, and when she bathes in the pools she finds she turns ugly. The pools reflect what is in your heart and soul. It was a touching book with the message that sometimes those that are sad don't know how to properly ask for the help they need.

This is a kind of cute, kind of off the wall picture book about a food chain looking for their next meal and then burping each other up at the end. I think boys would like it.

This was a really cute book about a boy who loses his hat at school, but is too scared of the custodian to check the lost and found for a few days. When he finally does he discovers all sorts of treasures, including an identical hat to his that his mom lost when she was a student at his school years ago. He also discovers that the custodian isn't so bad after all.

Cute story of not judging a book by its cover and knowing when to ask for help when you need it.

In this book Tallulah wants to hurry up and get on to the part of ballet class where she learns to dance on pointe. She finds a pair of pointe shoes in the trash that an older girl has thrown out and attempts to dance at home, only to find that it makes her toes hurt. When she returns them to the trash the previous owner tells her that maybe someday she'll be able to dance on pointe. Tallulah becomes determined that she will!

I thought that the older dancer in the story could have been more motivating and spoken to Tallulah about how hard she had to pracitce when she first started dancing. That would have made the story much stronger. To me it felt like this older character was almost discouraging in the way she talked to Tallulah.

A slightly weird tale of a kid who is nervous about his first day of school so finds an alligator to help him eat anything that he is afraid of. But once all his fears are gone he realizes that life's a little boring