Book Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Katie 
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a collection of poetry from Mr Rogers. There are a lot included and a lot of great illustrations to go with it – starting with the famous “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” which was the opening song to his show. I think my favorite in the book was “I’m Glad I’m the Way I Am” – the first verse “I’m glad I’m the way I am, I’m glad I’m me. I’, glad I’m the way That I’m supposed to be” resonates with me. The rest of it too, but mostly that first part. There are a lot of different topics covered in each of the poems/songs as well.
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated. This book will be released March 19, 2019 from Quirk Books.
About the Book
For the first time ever, 75 beloved songs from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and The Children’s Corner are collected in this charmingly illustrated treasury, sure to be cherished by generations of children as well as the millions of adults who grew up with Mister Rogers.
It’s you I like.
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair—
But it’s you I like.
From funny to sweet, silly to sincere, the lyrics of Mister Rogers explore such universal topics as feelings, new siblings, everyday life, imagination, and more. Through these songs—as well as endearing puppets and honest conversations—Mister Rogers instilled in his young viewers the values of kindness, self-awareness, and self-esteem. But most of all, he taught children that they are loved, just as they are. Perfect for bedtime, sing-along, or quiet time alone, this beautiful book of meaningful poetry is for every child—including the child inside of every one of us.
Love You Head To Toe is an adorable book about babies and comparing things they do to animals. Everything rhymes and the illustrations are made of paper piecing which you know I am alll about. Some of the animals featured are sea stars, turtles, kangaroos, hedgehogs. Each animal is illustrated as well as an illustration of an ADORABLE baby in a similar pose to the animals. A ton of work must have gone into these illustrations alone!
Baby Animals with their Families is a picture book that shows baby animals, with, you guessed it, their families. Some cuties included are chimps, lions, polar bears, and a ton of other adorable babies. A bunch of adorable photos and some interesting facts about families and what they are called and how they survive out in the wild.
Super Structures is all about some of the great structures in the world and their history. Building structures can go all the way back to the pyramids. In addition to talking a bit about the structures, there is also instructions on how to build your own using different pieces. In addition to pyramids you can also learn about and build pillars and posts, arches, domes, and my personal favorite, bridges. It features some of my favorite bridges – Golden Gate in San Francisco and Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. It then goes into towers and sky scrapers, big wheels, and finally wind turbines. I kind of wish I had the actual model kit so I could try to build some of these structures instead of just the e-book where I can only read about them.
The Sea Book helps you learn all about, what else? The sea! It shows what the bottom of the sea looks like and tells us why the sea is important and then goes into what lives in the sea. Of course there are plenty of fish in the sea – and it tells about some of the things that fish can do and some of the traits that fish in the sea have. It also talks about other mammals and animals in the sea, and even the life cycle of a sea turtle. The end of the book talks about some man made problems with the sea and how you can help. This book is pretty short, but is jam-packed with a TON of great information about the sea and some beautiful illustrations as well!
Not-So-Brave penguin is about Percy and Posy. Percy is brave and not scared of anything. Posy is scared of just about everything (kind of like me!) When Percy goes out to play and doesn’t come back, Posy gets worried. Everyone assures her that he is fine and that she just worries too much (also kind of like me!) but she decides to be brave and jump into the sea and try and find Percy. She finds Percy who is surprised that she made it to him – and Posy starts to get scared because of the dark. But Percy shows her that the sky was actually not scary, but BEAUTIFUL instead. Percy thanks Posy and tells her that she was brave!! She didn’t know she was brave!
The Little Book of Bad Moods is a workbook that lets you work through your bad moods. Some chapters include – “Blame Others”, “How to make any day a bad day” (I am excelling at this lately) and “Life Sucks Online”. Blame Others includes activities like – “How do you spot an idiot…” in traffic, at work, online, etc. Oh, can I have some fun with this 😉 Unlike the book I read the other day about having a gratitude journal – this book has an ingratitude journal where you list what bothered you each day of the week. (Sadly, I’d have a much easier time filling this out than the other way around.) But maybe once I go through and get all the negativity out of my system I’ll start feeling better? Or maybe I’m just destined to be in a bad mood forever… but at least I’ll have a record of who made me that way in this book.
When I saw the title “Let’s Talk About Sext” I figured it was going to be a book where the main characters predominately communicated via sexts. Except, that could not have been further from the plot of this book. In fact, I think they sent about 4 texts (debatable if they were even sexts, really) to each other in the entirety of the book. Anyway… once I got over that – I had to get over the names of the characters. I feel like everyone has to give their characters these unique names with unique spellings and half the time it makes it a lot harder for me to really connect with the characters because I can’t pick someone else with that name to think about as that character. While the male was Brody, which was normal enough, the female was Phebe. I assumed it was an alternate spelling of Phoebe. I kept reading it as plebe and I wasn’t even sure what that word meant but I knew it wasn’t a name.
You Goal, Girl is a goal setting work book to help you plan out and achieve your goals. The book explains that goals are the steps you take to make your dreams a reality. Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T – that is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. This is something that I struggle with – but I am trying to make things that are more measurable – that way it is easier to track your progress and know what you need to do to continue to get there and achieve it.
Over the summer I started a grad school class in Cyber Security so when Dawn of the Code War: America’s Battle Against Russia, China, and the Risking Global Cyber Threat came up on NetGalley for review, I knew I needed to check it out. It was a little bit weird to be reading bout subject matter that had come up in class when I was “skipping” class to travel (I just never registered because I knew I wouldn’t be able to fully commit to keeping up with the course work) and maybe part of the reason why I read it was because I felt a little bit guilty about not being in class.