La Madre Goose by Susan Middleton Elya is a retelling of several famous nursery rhymes. I adore this author because she incorporates Spanish vocabulary words into the text. The book also has a glossary at the front of the book in case the reader does not know a word. The reason I would love to use this book in my classroom is that it would serve a dual purpose. Students who are transitioning from speaking only English to being bilingual will benefit from having a book like this to read. All students in the classroom who are interested in learning about another language will have the option of adding vocabulary words from another language to their vocabulary. 

Lexile: AD490L 

This book is a set of stories about Tessa Beth as a baby, and the time she spends with her godmothers, Godmother Dear and Godmother Honey. Each story is followed by a recipe that goes with the story, and there are some cute little drawings throughout.

I really enjoyed the stories. They are cute, funny, and well written. The Godmothers seem like a lot of fun, and hearing about the things they do together was really neat. The recipes sound great and I look forward to giving them a try.

Highly recommend. I mean - cute kid stories, great characters AND cooking. How could it possibly be wrong?

A book which I ultimately just decided wasn't for me. The overall novel wasn't outside the sort of thing I look for in a horror novel, but the plot unfolded a little slowly for my tastes and there were other problems. It felt like it should have been a short story. The characters also didn't appear to be plausible within the context of the various situations. It was like: "You know that I think about it later over this cup of coffee, I should probably have done something about those four dead and mutilated girls I saw them just burying in the woods after I got whacked on the back of the head, and while I'm on it, I wonder what's up with my relationship with Kat and what about that brother I killed." Just doesn't ring true, like what or how real people would do or react to a particular fact or situation.

Characterization is key in a novel like this where the novel is mostly driven by their reaction to the outre elements when they are introduced. The setting here is a so-called typical town, not one of the levels of purgatory where you would already expect more unnatural behaviour in people. Robert McCammon and Stephen King are masters of this subgenre, and even Gary Braunbeck and Muriel Gray do a better job of this when they dip into it. I just ultimately didn't buy the inner thoughts, actions, or dialog and therefore the characters became something two dimensional who didn't involve me in the decidedly eerie goings on.

I'm sure there are plenty who will be entertained by this novel and presumably the rest of the Division Mythos novels, just not me.