This is one of our family's favorite books in the "non-religious" category. Mr. and Mrs. Mallard are looking for a safe place to start their duck family. They make friends with Michael the policeman who helps Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings make their way safely to the Public Garden to meet up with Mr. Mallard. The illustrations are SO charming - my children ask for this over and over. I like the recently reprinted full-sized paperback edition, with the original brown-and-white illustrations, better than the smaller and somewhat less-expensive version published by Scholastic.

This latest title in the Bethlehem Books Lamb Time series is a short but sweet (and very funny) story about a busy little girl going through the very important and imaginative process of getting ready to walk the dog. Any parent with small children will appreciate the humorous truth about how children are that the author so clearly understands, even in such a simple story. This shouldn't surprise fans of the author's grandmother and the book's illustrator, Hilda Van Stockum, whose own books portray a beautiful understanding of small children.

My two reading-age children (ages 6 and 8) so enjoyed the punch line that they fought over who would be the first one to read the story to Daddy. As evidenced from the sticky fingerprints on every page, my younger children (ages 2 and 4) have been poring over the book as well. The story could be easily read by a younger reader who knows most of the phonograms (the story includes a few "challenging" words, such as "thought" and "would").

Nancy Brown and Hillside Education have teamed up for a second volume of kid-friendly mysteries adapted from G.K. Chesterton's Fr. Brown mysteries. It's a little difficult to say what age these are appropriate for since, unlike the first volume, these are all based on murder-mystery stories, and sensitivities vary from child-to-child. My rough-and-tumble seven year old son loved them as a read-aloud, but the general subject matter is off-putting for my very sensitive thirteen year old daughter. There are four stories in this volume: "The Invisible Man" is about a murderer who took advantage of the fact that many people are taken for granted because we see them all of the time. "The Mirror of the Magistrate" involves a murder with some mysterious clues that could easily be interpreted in the wrong direction. "The Eye of Apollo" tells of a prophet of a "new religion" who is up to no good. In "The Perishing of the Pendragons", a disgruntled murderer uses superstition to cover up his crimes. The stories emphasize the solving of each mystery and the thinking involved in the solution - which includes some very interesting insights into human nature and its foibles and limitations.