Owly is two years old and he wants to know how high, how deep, how far, how much about EVERYTHING! His mother patiently helps him to discover the answers to his numerous questions by seeking the facts himself. He goes off to count exactly how many waves there are in the ocean and finds there are so many he can't count them all. Similar experiments yield similar fruit. The endearing story eventually reaffirms his mother's deep love for him as well. I think this book's message is very sweet and comforting and I think this is a good story. However, I'm not as excited about the illustrations. David Wiesner is one of my very favorite illustrators of children's literature and well deserving of the Caldecott Award he recieved for his book called Tuesday. The pictures in this book while sweet are very much on the dull side. Look at the cover picture and that is essentally all you will see for the rest of the book's 16 illustrations. All of the illustrations are very, very similar. We see baby Owly and his mother (cute brown owls) sitting on a black tree branch with a round white moon and round white stars, or yellowish streaks indicating sunrise, or pale greenish blue indicating daylight. We see Owly take flight in two pictures. We see him sitting on the shore in one. We see the two owls cuddling. The colors are all pale washes in the yellow-blue range. Wiesner has given the two owls cute expressions. I would never say that this fine artist has created bad illustrations. Never! But these are dull and take the book from the realm of 5 stars to that of 3. You will never find that this book creates anything but positive memories...but that is only IF it creates a memory at all.

MY BOYS ARE NOW 19 AND 15 AND I USED TO READ THEM THIS BOOK WHEN THEY WERE SMALL. ONE IS NOW IN AWAY IN COLLEGE, THE OTHER IS, WELL, 15. BUT WHENEVER WE SAY GOODNIGHT OR SO LONG WE WOULD SAY I LOVE YOU-----AS MANY STARS AS THERE ARE IN THE SKY, ETC. I AM NOW PREPARING FOR ANOTHER BABY AND I WANT TO SHARE THE SAME JOY THAT WE GET NOW. IT IS AN EXCELLENT BOOKS. HOLD ON TO THESE STORIES AND TREASURE YOUR CHILDREN. ENJOY, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.

This is a great book. I would recomend it to anyone young or old

Mrs. Davis' 5th grade class at the Hamilton School found these events to be the most exciting in the book. By parachuting from a plane, Ed Goddard was trying to escape with money he had stolen. Unable to remove the parachute he was dragged and injured and lost the briefcase with the money. Jamie saw him parachuting from the plane while studying the clouds. Jamie is dyslexic and struggles to read but can see images in the clouds. Jamie's friend Gillian Lurie found the lost briefcase and was kidnapped by Ed Goddard. She left a clue for Jamie to follow and send help. She used a stick to point in the direction she was being taken. There was some discussion about the chapters changing from one character to another making the book confusing. The class decided that Avi wrote the book this way to give the reader a "split screen" of the same events from the point of view of different characters.

Half the class felt that they would recommend the book to a friend. The whole class agreed that there were exciting moments throughout the book.(Submitted by Ms. Willett, Lower School Librarian)

Book Review of Avi's Man from the Sky

Man from the Sky , by Avi, takes place in a small town in Pennsylvania near the border of New York. Jamie Peters, age 11, is a dreamer. Although he is unable to read books, Jamie spends his free time reading the sky. Jamie is able to see dragons, castles, and knights. One day while reading the sky, Jamie sees a man named Ed Goddard parachuting with a suitcase. Gillian Lurie, Jamie's neighbor, is jealous of Jamie's interesting hobby of reading the sky. In an attempt to find out how Jamie reads the sky, she watches him one day. While watching him, Gillian discovers a mysterious suitcase that leads her and Jamie into trouble.

My favorite scene in this book is when Ed Goddard makes a gun out of wood. This is impressive because the gun looks real enough to fool people. Also, the fact that Goddard is clever enough to make a wood gun so that it will pass through the metal detectors at the airport is also an exciting part of the book.

Although I enjoyed this book, I found it confusing the way the author continually switched back and forth from scenes and characters in each chapter. For example, in one chapter Ed Goddard is looking at planes, and in the following chapter Jamie is reading the sky. However, eventually the book becomes less confusing when the author brings the characters together. Man from the Sky, by Avi, is suspenseful and interesting. I recommend this book to readers my age.

Submitted by David Apfelbaum, grade 6.

Man from the sky

Would you like to be a kid that likes to look up at the sky and imagine seeing things or to have a neighbor that spies on you? This is a story about Jamie who loves to look up at the sky and daydream. But one day instead of daydreaming Jamie see's a man from the sky parachuting! This amazing 120 page book by Avi is about Jamie's friend, Gillian, who gets into a lot of trouble one day. If you tie everything together, you should be able to guess what happens. If I told you I would spoil it, so you should definitely read it! I would rate it a five star book because of it's exciting and suspenseful characters and what happens. The book has an ok writing style because it doesn't have unique writing every word, but it is still a great book and I strongly recommend it.

-Tomás Sowles

Bought this book for my 5 year old son who is interested in gargoyles. The book has beautiful black and white illustrations. The story uses poetic descriptions too difficult for younger children. You won't get through the book without stopping at least 5 times to answer questions. For ages 4-8? I don't think so!

Visions of frolicking gargoyles delighting in night, splish-splashing in watery fountains, and spooking unwanted humans tempt the senses of readers as Eve Bunting nimbly weaves her silvery text around these stony figures. Each page sets forth a new scene of the gargoyles' brief revelry before they are destined, once again, to return to "squat high on corners...empty eyes unblinking...". The text is intertwined from page to page with a lyrical yet unconscious rhythm, permeating each scene with a spookiness enhanced by the onminous repetition "till night comes". Wiesner's two-toned pastels soften the contrast of light to dark, enhancing the story's black and white ghostliness as the gargoyles come to life-lounging in trees, spewing water, and making faces at one another. His illustrations animate these "pock-marked" characters in a way that text alone cannot. Shadowy visages added to haunted expressions reveal an underlying tone whispering hints of the supernatural. Perfectly mysterious for reading out loud, this book will bewitch readers and listeners, school-age and beyond, with its timeless tale of the creepy-crawlies that come out at night.

Dr. Bradley starts on May 29, 1946 as Navy ships leave San Francisco for the mid-Pacific. "Operation Crossroads" was a test of nuclear weapons occurring on Bikini Atoll in 1946. The 1948-edition jacket reads, "...Convinced published reports available to the average man have given him an incomplete and therefore distorted view, have even perhaps lulled him into a false sense of security, Dr. Bradley has interpreted the real truth for everyone to read." Bradley reports events in a log format by date. The flavor of the trip is accurately described along with technical remarks. Bradley comments, "Sailors can be the most profane and uncouth men on earth... It would be impossible to record the language they use. It is so degenerate, so monotonously vile, that even the most blasphemous expressions become meaningless." The trip is described like some bizarre Rick Steves video with a medical flavor. Bradley details events of the days prior to the tests, Able Day test, and Baker Day test. He describes observations and complex physics in terms the lay person can appreciate. For example, "...the damage seems to be so haphazard and occasionally so violent as to suggest the action of some primordial force beyond one's comprehension. The energy released in the explosion of an atomic bomb is that mysterious energy which holds the nuclei of atoms together. The unstable uranium or plutonium nucleus requires a vast amount of energy to hold it together, whereas the binding energy required to hold together a smaller more stable atom like barium is proportionally much less.It is the excess of nuclear energy which is given off (since it is no longer needed) when fission takes place and the heavy, unstable atom breaks down into several smaller, stable units." He gives a medical perspective, laced with reality, describing the events of the test: "...[conditions] are still far better than one could hope for in time of atomic war. It is indeed hard to imagine that a population or an army exposed to a similar rain of radioactive material could ever afford the luxury of urinalysis. From a medical as well as a military point of view, urinalysis, blood counts, and other such protective measures would be about as useful to a fellow in such a catastrophe as Metropolitan Life Insurance." The final entry in the book describes October 9 & 10. An appendix details basic nuclear physics and radioactivity. While this work may have been forgotten by many it is an important firsthand accountof a nuclear detonation: an event (hopefully) few of us will ever witness.

Getting students to see the connection between their classes is often difficult. Students in middle school do not see that Literature and Social Studies are interconnected. Yep's tales help suppliment an often "boring" unit on Ancient China.

At first, I wasn't surprise to see the Caldecott stamp on the book knowing Wiesner's beautiful children's books. After reading it, I was surprised it won. The illustration is as beautiful and high quality as we've come to expect in Wiesner's stories.

I love old-fashioned tales with a twist like "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs" and this one tries, but it's not easy to "get it" when the pigs fly out of the pages and into the pages of nursery rhymes (for two pages) and another story that I didn't recognize.

The story gets choppy once they leave the traditional story and it doesn't quite make sense to an adult the first time much less a 4-year-old. The words just don't flow well when exiting the traditional story.

On a brighter note, my son has been asking us to read it anyway (I think he likes the pictures), so we didn't completely waste our money (that and it was the school's book fair).

Everyone knows the story of The Three Pigs. They build their houses of straw and wood and brick. The big bad wolf comes and huffs and puffs and... David Wiesner has taken this old tale and given it a clever and very inventive twist. Instead of being eaten, the pigs escape, take their book apart to confuse and keep the wolf away, build a paper airplane and fly off on a fairy tale adventure of their own. Mr Wiesner keeps his humorous text spare and simple and let's his marvelous artwork tell the story. Youngster's imaginations will soar as they examine the colorful, expressive and detailed illustrations. Perfect for children 4-8, The Three Pigs tells an old familiar story in a new, creative and innovative way and is a MUST for all home libraries.

In the blurb about the author, we are reminded of the wonderful ending to one of Wiesner's earlier books, "Tuesday," in which pigs fly (since frogs fly, too). Now the pigs get their own book and we can all be grateful for this new adventure.

At first, this book appears to be a beautifully illustrated retelling of the fairy tale classic, "The Three Little Pigs." But when the wolf blows one of the pigs out of the story, we quickly join the pigs on an unusual journey in which pigs fly, a cow jumps over the moon, and a dragon becomes a pig's best friend. The story is not predictable and the clever illustrations will require many rereadings to catch all of their nuances.

Wiesner's humor and gorgeous art will entertain children and any adult lucky enough to join in on the fun. This book will also make a great companion to another fractured fairy tale, Jon Scieszka's "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs."