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Beautiful poetry, beautiful art, and very soothing narration. (I just didn't like the orange panel about the dream, it kinda woke me up and cut the soothing-dark-colors-of-the-night feeling).
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-17
After loosing my dog due to cancer, I wanted to read a cute and short story about dog love. And let me tell you that this book exceeded by best expectations!
Dog cuteness? check
Adoption with pre-interview by the rescue organization? check
Tripod (omg just like our dog)? check
Queer couple (At this point, my wife and I were just wondering if this was a sign)? check
Loving and responsible extended family? check
Happy and sweet ending? check
If you are looking for the story of a loving family adopting a tripod dog and doing everything they can to make the life of this puppy easier (ramp, chariot, carriage, wheels), and showering it with love, look no further! Highly recommend it!
I received an advance review copy for free from BookSirens, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Visually violent and eye-opening.
“Because it is illegal to sell liquor on most southwestern reservations, resident Indians who want to drink visit the surrounding communities. These bordertowns have the liquor and are settings of varied and extensive drinking activities. The fact most Indians have neither shelter nor money for rooms makes the display of binge drinking visible to everyone.”
That was a very funny book, and parents were all in too!
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-08
This is a difficult book. A small rabbit feels that his mom is unfair and doesn't let him do what he wants, especially letting him marry her. As we read the book, we discover that the mom stays in bed all day, forgets to do laundry, spends hours watching tv, and stays lethargic even when her kid goes away. She might suffer from clinical depression. The book revolves around the anger and frustration of the baby bunny, and it's hard to know what to make of this book. Those topics deserve to be talked about, but I don't feel like this book did it well. I would not recommend it.
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-25
Toriki the rabbit and Kouma the giraffe decide to exchange sizes to see how life feels that way. Soon enough, they realize that it might not have been the best idea... This book is great to teach kids about being happy with who you are and enjoying our specific strengths and characteristics. I gave it a two stars because the illustrations were strange and I didn't enjoy them.
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-22
This book could have been a great way for kids to learn the different days of the week and some colors, but there were too many wrong messages in the books to even consider recommending it.
The day the wolf decides to wear pink, he looks at himself in the mirror and realizes with utter disgust that he looks like a princess. This is unacceptable! It is saying that looking like a women is ugly and horrible! Then, the next day, he covered himself in brown mud and hates looking all brown. Finally, he decides to hurt a peacock by removing all of his features to look handsome. And then something really weird happens... There are so many female wolves walking around him -because of how beautiful he has become- that he decides to finally accept his natural color.
What is even this book? So many toxic gender stereotypes and wrong ways to teach kids to love themselves the way they are.
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-23
What a warm story. I absolutely loved this daddy bear going on a one-day adventure with his pup, and celebrating being together. The choice of colors and the light effects are mesmerizing!
read and reviewed: 2018-10-10
A 8 year old boy, tired of his daily routine, decided to take a break and to be retired. He flies to Happy Sunset, a splendid retirement center in Florida. His days are filled with golfing, taking a nap at the pool, playing cards or learning how to play chess. But maybe life as a retired boy is not that much fun in the end... I absolutely love this book and its unique idea!
Read and reviewed: 2018-12-04
What attracted me to this book: the cover and the tags (Gay Romance, Erotic Romance, Science Fiction Romance, Space Romance, Kinky Romance, Smut Romance, Polyamory, Queer Characters, Novels, and Debut)
What kept me reading: the quality of the writing, the intrigue, and how hot the sex scenes were!
Who I would recommend this book to: seriously anyone who loves a good erotic romance!
This book absolutely blew me away. I don't remember the last time I enjoyed reading a book as much as I did this one. It had everything I loved: sci-fi setting, cool and intriguing queer non-binary polyamory kinky characters, sooooo many ups and downs and emotional moments, a super diverse cast of characters where every one is completely distinct from each other, and an ending that got me guessing till the end. The ending!!!!! It was so hard to read but I really like that the author chose it. My heart...
Niska Morrow, please please pleaaaaaaaaaase write more! I want to read your next book today!
This was such a trip, it taught me that self-published weird and kinky books are where my heart is now haha <3. LOVE IT!
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Satisfying but not amazing. It entertained me for two hours :)
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
This is the perfect book to show good parenting skills!
One morning, while her dad walks the family dog, the little girl discovers pinecones. And when I say discovers, I should say “loves at first sight” and “gets immediately obsessed with” pinecones. While the dog drags papa up and down the path, ending in a magnificent fall in the mud, this little girl collects all the pinecones she can get her hands on, giving them family names one by one.
Cutting to later in the story, what does the dad do when he discovers the mountain of pinecones collected and accumulated in her room and across the house? React like a good dad! No scolding, no disapproval, but instead he decides to decorate the full house with pinecones, celebrating his daughter's new hobby and fascination. This was utterly charming and made me feel all warm in my heart.
And about papa and the dog falling in the mud? Parenting at its best once again: letting the dog play in the mud, then carrying it back in his arms, before drying it and cleaning it with a fluffy towel, starting a laundry, and getting a nice cup of tea. Just patience, love, and letting his kids be kids. Just perfect.
And did I mention how charming the illustrations are? The facial expressions and overall body language are so on point! And I love the pattern effects! Just great, great, great! Extra point: bi-racial family and possibly single dad!
Highly, highly recommend this book, go get it for your kids, schools, and libraries once it is out on 9/10/2024!
I received an advance review copy for free from Edelweiss and the publisher Candlewick, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Cute characters but I feel tired of the endless bully who gets trapped and then rescued by the friendly main characters. It felt like I've heard this story over and over, and that this book doesn't bring anything new. I also didn't like that the writer perpetuates the motto ““words don't hurt””, as a way of protecting oneself from the bully's insults.
There is some positive teaching at the end of the book, as the bully learns to apologize and to explain that his behavior comes from a feeling of being left out.
The characters are very cute and I would love to read more stories from them.
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-16
- The King Penguin can dive to 1,100 ft (340m) and stay underwater for almost 15 minutes.
- The Emperor Penguin can survive temperatures down to -75°F (-60°C).
Penguin Distribution
32 extinct penguin have been identified and documented with the help of fossil finds. Their identification was possible because penguins have a redundant leg joint, and the breastbone to which their powerful wing muscle are attached is uniquely shaped. 17 (arguably 18) species are currently found, and they all live in the southern hemisphere.
Penguins have been around for millions of years, but the Adélie Penguin did not arrive in the Antarctic until approximatively 6,000 years ago. Because these birds need firm, ice-free ground for their nests, they were unable to settle there while the continent was still covered in ice.
The smallest penguin species live near the equator - on the Galápagos Islands for example - while larger species such as the Emperor Penguin are found in the Antarctic. This is known as the The Bergmann's Rule. In 1847, the zoologist Carl Bergmann established that individuals of a species are smaller the closer they are to the equator and that they increase in size nearer the poles. This is because warm-blooded animals with a large body volume in relation to to surface area are better adapted to storing heat and conserving energy in cold climates than smaller individuals.
Like all other penguins, King Penguins live near a food supply. They spend the breeding and molting seasons on islands, but, because they are well adapted to long-distance swimming and deep diving, the rest of the time they remain in the sea. Where cold water from the bottom of the ocean reaches the surface along the rim of the Antarctic ice shelves, it carries nutrients to the surface, and so there is a rich food supply here. In one year, a million pairs of King Penguins eat approximately 750,000 tons of lanternfish and 65,000 tons of squid. This is about 1% of the total stock of lanternfish of the entire Southern Ocean. Together with other marine birds and mammals, they have a major impact on the local food chains.
It's easy to recognize an active penguin colony. It is just as easy to spot an abandoned colony by the dark green carpet of lush vegetation that covers the previously exposed ground. The soil often remains high in nutrients for hundreds, even thousands, of years after the colony has been abandoned. While it is populated, however, not many plants are able to stand the high levels of nitrates and phosphates combined with the constant wear from penguins feet. Lichen and grass can form on the outskirts or on protruding rocks within the colony.
When it is time to breed, King Penguins start to look for a place where they can incubate their eggs and raise their young together with other penguins - this ensures that there are always other birds around to feed the young. It takes more than a year to raise a chick, molt, and eat in preparation for the next season, which is why King Penguins are able to breed only in only two years out of three.
All penguins species, including the Gentoo, are believed to have emerged somewhere near the center of the Gondwanaland continent at the point where South America, Africa, and Antarctica started to drift apart.
The largest penguin species are able to incubate only a single egg, which they keep warm under a fold of skin on top of their feet. Magellanic Penguins, on the other hand, nest in burrows and normally incubate two eggs at a time by lying on them.
A very pleasant book about the joy of celebrating Christmas with your family, and the mysteries of angels and their small miracles. Both texts and illustrations were perfect at capturing this warm holiday feeling.
Read and reviewed: 2018-11-28
This is the story of Kiki who wakes up feeling sick. He calls his friend to come to the rescue. Then, follows an adorable day of two friends taking care of each other. It's charming, it's warm, it's sweet. Great, great narration from the 90's.
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-25
A charming and poetic book about the moon visiting earth.
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-23
After loving so much their previous book Duck and ranking as one of my favorite picture books of this year, I feel very disappointed by Horsefly and Honeybee. This one is the story of two baby bugs who learn to cooperate together after a big nasty fight. Even if the book ends on a positive note, I feel like there were too many violent moments and that the cooperation happened in such a tragic and dead-end moment that it was not exactly learned the proper way. I feel hopeless for those two bugs, knowing what will happen to them after the book ends.
Read and reviewed: 2018-10-23
A young girl starts asking question about the world around her, and her teacher helps her find her answers via the world of physics. This is really how a kid thinks, and I liked it a lot :)
Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Where to start, what to say except that this book is life changing and that upon finishing it, I was ready to start reading it again, as I knew I would grasp new concepts that I didn't fully understand before. Instead, I started reading Conversation with God: Awaken the species, Book 4, as it was published shortly in 2017, shortly after I finished the first 3 volumes. The timing is always right and today was the day. That day was the day.
Read and reviewed: 2020-12-20
0.5 star
Orientalit, sexist, offensive, extremely poorly written... Just some tacky sex story in the middle of a sci-fi anthology...
Read and reviewed: 2022-06-20
The first poem Piedra del Sol is magnificent, then we have short poems that are quite boring. The middle of the book is all about orientalism after a trip to India, and the poems are not good. After his letter to Leon, the quality rises again, as he comes back to the sun, elements, transparency and the original. His last poem, Blanco, is great. Throughout the whole collection, the themes that are coming back are sun, transparency, women, ideé fixe, duality, eyes, bodies, sex, death.
Read and reviewed: 2020-10-31
I kind of see what the author wanted to do with this short story but the quality of the writing was way too low to make it a good story.
Some reviews suggest that the story could benefit from being a longer story, but I think it would actually be better as a flash fiction with fewer characters. It would have allowed the writer to (maybe) struggle less with the transitions between events, thoughts, and spatial dimensions.
The dialogues, the transitions, and the world building are the weaknesses of the story. The high level concept is what's slightly better.
Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.