This dover little activity book isn't as lovely as it could be. Extremely plain designs, and the only planets shown are Saturn and Earth. Half the pictures are of stars, and they're boring, plain. I could draw this just as good as they do, and I am no kind of an artist. Definitely not of the same quality as other stained glass coloring books.

This is a small book with black and white images printed on "special paper that allows the light to shine through." Basically you color the pictures and hang them on a window. The book is about 4"x6" and has 8 images - the Big Dipper, Saturn, Star, Group of Stars, Crescent Moon and Stars, Comet, Earth and the Sun.

I'm not sure what I expected, but this wasn't it. The story is clear enough, but the writing style is very bland. An attempt is made at Yoda's style of speaking, but without much success. The illustrations are not quite right. There's no excitement here, either in prose or pictures.

Though it's a book for kids (my guess, ages 8-12), it seems to me the small size would put off most children.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone except a Star Wars completist.

I picked this board book as a gift mainly because it was age appropriate for the child I was giving it to and also because it had "star" in its title. (I like star stuff.) I think shopping online and using "searchable" words probably fosters that kind of behavior. Anyway, there are some really bright, colorful and charming board books out there, but this is not one of them. The artwork is plain and the colors are limited and not vibrant. We usually buy each of the nieces and nephews a book for Christmas, but I ended up going to Sam's Club and buying another board book (at a price even lower than this one, I might add!) to supplement this gift.

John Vornholt is a very two-faced star trek author, with the ability to produce ambitious and well written stories, while producing just as many naivé and brainless action adventures.

"Crossfire" is the purest example of the latter.

The main character is the drily portrayed younger version of Geordie LaForge, who works as a roadie for the Starfleet Academy Big Band, where the equally dimensionless younger version of Will Riker plays the trombone.

The book starts with the band traveling to a music competition on Pasifica, the much mentioned vacation planet of Starfleet officers.

The first half of this ridiculously short, but still overstrched story centeres around the question of the band winning or not, with tons of unnecessary and clumsy scenes filling the pages. The action begins as a bunch of Orios kidnapp the band.

Why?

Because they like the way they play, of course; no more, no less.

The band is taken to a planet where Orion troops are fighting as mercinaries in a war they've got nothing to do with, and the band is instructed to cheer them up. And of course the fighting begins just as they get there, leaving LaForge and Riker stranded together in the middle of a war zone.

Needless to say, the book has a discusting 'Happily Ever After'-ending, wich involves a lot of technobabble and a solution any reader can figure out aieons before the characters.

By the end of the book, I was truly perplexed by the question of how such a potential author could waste his time on something so utterly horrible.