This is an easy, easy-to-read book about mice delivering valentines. Only one sentence on each page makes it a pleasant reading experience for the child. It's a great Valentine's gift for children.

My four-year old daughter regularly gives this book as a birthday present for her friends. I am tempted to reveal the thought-provoking surprise that comes at the end, but it's important that each reader discover it on his own.

I understand why Harriet is the #1 reviewer - she put in words exactly how I felt about the book. I thought the setting and "history" of the period was interesting, but I just could not become attached to any of the characters.

This book sheds light on a really eye-opening bit of history in the free-for-all boomtown that San Francisco was in the late 19th Century. The style is interesting as well: a contemporary Chinese immigrant to the US speaks directly to a Chinese prostitute in the 19th Century, experiencing her life in those turbulent times and seeing what has changed and what has not. The prostitute, Fusang, is enigmatic because she defies categorization. She does not need to be rescued and, despite her lot, she is not an object of pity. She is who she is, accepts her fate, and has an almost Boddhisattva-like compassion for those who wrong her.

Chris realized that he had never, ever understood Fusang. -The Lost Daughter of Happiness

Geling Yan, a widely respected young Chinese author, immigrated to the United States after the Tienanmen Square massacre. She is best known here for the movie Xiu Xiu : The Sent Down Girl, the script for which she cowrote with director and childhood friend Joan Chen, from Yan's own short story. In this new novel, set in the 1870s, she has borrowed a figure from history, Fusang, the most famous prostitute in San Francisco, and has imagined an unusual lover for her, a 12 year old white boy named Chris.

Approaching the issue of anti-Chinese racism through these two characters, she tells a tale of slavery, rape and murder, and, ostensibly, love. I say ostensibly because Chris and Fusang remain completely opaque throughout the novel; we can never comprehend their motivations or thought processes. One of the things that helps to make them so mysterious is that the novel is narrated by a female descendant of Fusang, who has gathered 160 texts about the Chinese experience in San Francisco, in an effort to understand her enigmatic ancestor's life.

I may well be wide of the mark here, but it seems like Yan's point may be that Fusang and Chris are equally incomprehensible to each other, as they are to us. In fact, though the novel has the structure of an epic love story, the message would seem to be that there is something fundamentally illusory in such interracial love affairs. At one point she says of Chris :

He has yet to realize that the infatuation one feels for what one cannot understand is just as violent as the animosity.

This linkage of racist hatred with cross-cultural romance, though awfully harsh, has more than a grain of truth to it. Equally stern is her later judgment of Chris, when he wants Fusang to marry him :

It is as if being with you, Fusang, is not a matter of anything so shallow as love or happiness, but rather a grand sacrifice. Or perhaps when love reaches this stage it crowds out ordinary feelings and becomes a doctrine, an ideal, that can only be realized through sacrifice. He is using you to enact his sacrifice for the ideal of love. He also wants to show everyone of his race and yours that his self-sacrifice will form a bridge across the racial divide.

It's hard to imagine a more stinging indictment of the kind of racial understanding which, though it masquerades as selflessness and acceptance of others, is really based as much on objectification of those "others" as is racism.

In what I found the most powerful passage of the book, which after all is an examination of racism and violence directed against Chinese-Americans, Yan, in discussing the causes of a riot, reveals just how universal and non-specific is the human hatred which fuels such incidents, and even links it to the Cultural Revolution in China :

Hatred is amazing. It makes people self-righteous; it drives them with a sense of mission. I'm not talking about revenge; that's too simple. People are born with a higher form of hatred, so immense it doesn't even need a target. Like love so vast no object is necessary. This kind of hatred can lie dormant for years, like a swell of darkness, and people are never even conscious of it. But once the darkness is breached, all rationality drowns and the things people do out of hatred serve only the purpose of fulfilling an overwhelming emotional need. Burning, smashing, killing, rape--they're all just channels. It doesn't even matter what started it, because people quickly become intoxicated by the sheer spectacle of destruction. Like love at the earth-shattering stage, hatred by this point feeds on itself, simply for its own sake. The pleasure of watching some person or thing destroyed by one's own hand is virtually orgasmic.

When I was a child I saw those sexual impulses they called the cultural revolution and those orgasms they called rebellion. The gratification of hatred produces the same rapture in everyone.

This is a very dark--though I would argue realistic--vision of human nature.

This darkness, combined with various scenes of violence, the emotional distance of the central characters, the sparseness of the author's prose, make this a book that many people will not enjoy. Quite honestly, I wasn't sure if I liked it until I thought about it for quite awhile. But ultimately, despite the somewhat harrowing nature of the story, the brutal honesty of Yan's ideas won me over. And the more I've thought about it, the more I appreciate it.

GRADE : A-

Not as cute or informative as I had hoped. I was looking for an age appropriate Thanksgiving story for my 3-year old, but this is defintely more for toddlers than preschoolers. Not quite exciting enough to hold his interest.

This is a pleasant but fairly mediocre Thanksgiving book for young kids. Its premise is that mice are putting on a play about the first thanksgiving. We watch the show and then cheer at the end. The artwork has a few clever moments in it depicting stage hand mice pushing Plymouth rock props into the scene, etc. The text, however, doesn't flow very well. It is told in terse couplets, as if in verse, yet often the verses fail to rhyme - or if they do, we wait a few pages for the rhyme to come. Thus, any readaloud singsong quality which the text is apparently meant to have (and which is the only thing that might compensate for its abruptness) is foiled. The idea of the play is engaging enough to make this an interesting addition to the sometimes thin genre of Thanksgiving picture books.

Adorable mice enthusiastically bumble through a Thanksgiving play for their friends. But they successfully convey the history and joy of the day, and then have a fun feast with their friends to celebrate. This book is a lively way to give children the basic history of Thanksgiving and is a fun read as well. Highly recommended!

Any book by Jane Yolen is sure to be good and this one is no different. My kids love the clever rhymes and lifting all the fun flaps. The pictures are bright and interesting and there is a wealth of details to be discovered on subsequent readings. The only suggestion I have (as in all flap books) is covering the flaps with clear contact which makes them a bit more durable! Lots of fun!

Benny's Bad Day in my opinion is an excelent book for young people. It shows that even if your day has been a bad one, you can always start over the next day. Yes, a new day, a new day brings a new start. A new start that can change your frown into a smile. In the book Benny had a bad day but he got through it and the next day was better.This story teaches us to look forward to a new day.

For those of you and your children who did not get enough of the many adventures of Bicycle Bear ( in the original Book Bicycle Bear ) Here he is again. Although not as great as the original story it is still an excellent children's book for Bicycle Bear fans everywhere. This is another great Parents Read aloud Book thats fun to read over and over. The original Author and illustrator team up again for this book. Bicycle Bear is back again only this time he enlists the help of his nephew tricycle bear. These delivery bear adventures will be a hit with the kids and adults. This is a great story which also help to teach the importance of teamwork to achieve goals. My Daughter loved it too!

The Mystery of King Karfu is a colorful book done for children of all ages. Even as a 26 year old, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author, Doug Cushman does a wonderful job leading the reader though deductive thought and problem solving strategies in order to solve the mystery of the theft of the Stone Chicken.

Through the illustrations and the note book style of writing, Seymour Sleuth the ace detective, weaves his way through the different stories and alibis in order to solve the mystery. Each picture and suspect offers a clue for the reader to study so they can help solve the mystery in the end.

He does a great job bringing all levels of readers into the story so they can truely enjoy this book. Young children can look at the details of the illustrations and achieve an understanding of what is going while the reader can read the story to them. He also accurately protrays the animals and landscape indicative of Egypt.

The book develops the problem solving skills of young readers which is a critical skill for future success in school and an ever increasingly interdependent world. I recommend this book to all parents and teachers for it not only entertains the reader but it also helps a child begin to develop all types of skills. It is a vaiation of the ABC books of old and in my opinion it allows the reader to feel part of what is going on in the story.

Three pigs use their talents to get materials to build there house in return. One by one its destroyed by an evil wolf. At the end, the wolf is the loser of the game. At different times throughtout the story audience is asked what is missing from that particular scene.