What Planet Are You from, Clarice Bean?

I am drawn (ha!) to books with fun or beautiful illustrations. Journal-style kids books with collage illustrations have a soft spot in my heart. I love how she fleshed out the characters in such little space, and will have to read others in this series.

Clarice Bean is learning about environmentalism at school. Her partner for the school project wants to do an experiment about the speeds of snails and worms, but Clarice has more important things on her mind, like protesting the removal of an old tree on her street. Clarice Bean is a precocious,

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opinionated heroine whose quirks will appeal to readers. The environmental message is clear without being preachy. This book is illustrated with bright, doodle-style collage illustrations. The text forms a part of the illustrations, running in all directions as the sense of the text and the needs of the illustrations suggest. The combination of these elements produce an attractive, spunky book that will appeal to independent readers between the second and fourth grades. The illustrations also run over onto the end pages, making this book potentially more environmentally friendly, but producing a drawback for readers who borrow this book from a library that attaches the dust jacket to the endpapers, obscuring the beginning and end of the story.

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"Sometimes I think gravity is a pity," says Clarice Bean, who is learning about planet Earth in school. For a project on the environment, her brain leaps to the holes in the sky from her sister’s hairspray and the nature safari in her brother’s bedroom. But when a big neighborhood tree is about

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to be chopped to pieces, she has no choice but to join her quirky family in its branches and save the day.

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not my favorite by Lauren Child. My little one recognized the illustration style right away and wanted to know where Lola was!

This was a book that seemed geared towards an older Lauren Child fan. My little one is only 3 so some of this was just too big for her right now. I did not take that into my

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star rating as that is my own personal thing - not an issue with the book.

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Despite cover, this is not an astronomy book. But it is funny, and teachers as well as kids can learn stuff from it.