This first look at robins follows a full year of growth and change: how the birds develop inside their egg during the spring, how they mature from chicks into fledglings in the summer, how they learn to fly in the fall, and how they leave for warmer climes in winter—only to return when spring comes around again.
Score one against rigid school standards with this farce that turns everything upside down, including both rote learning and creativity. Lester's laid-back text is packed with silly puns, and Munsinger's hilariously detailed line-and-watercolor pictures express the delicious relaxation of Sleepy Valley Sloth School, where everyone, teachers and kids, literally hangs around. When a new sloth, Sparky, comes to school, full of vim and vigor, the others shove her away, until a real boar arrives from the Society for Organizing Sameness and declares that the school has such low ratings it will be closed. Then Sparky springs into action, leading her classmates in wild pretenses, physical and verbal, that trick the official into leaving them all, including Sparky, in peace for a very long nap. It's adults who will appreciate the ridicule of school bureaucrats and their standards. Kids will love the wordplay ("What's two plus two?" "For . . . get it.") and the pictures of the hairy snoring sloths who each do nothing their own way. Hazel Rochman
