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Based on real events, this book focuses on telling a story about one of Luis Soriano's travels to a remote village with his burros. This book was described to me by many teachers as a "good resource to learn about Colombia," but I find that I disagree.

Luis's story is interesting, and I do think that it deserves to be told. However, I feel like this book structures his work in a way that makes it palatable and includes elements without considering the implications of how it's being done.

Part of what makes me feel this way is that there is a brief scene where a bandit tries to hold up Luis (demanding his silver) and then steals a book instead, letting him go. While I'm not going to discount the possibility of its veracity, I do find that its inclusion would still lead children to the stereotype that everyone making journeys to rural Colombia is constantly held up at the whims of bandits. It feels like the common media depiction of everyday life, when I'm sure the kinds of negative impacts that people endure on the daily basis are of a wider variety.

I also think it undermines the story that Luis, himself, explained; he had seen that the students he worked with, as a schoolteacher (a thing that is conveniently left out of the main text and is only mentioned in a quick biographical note at the back that can be easily skipped over), endured a wide variety of hardships and wanted to do what he was able in order to provide more for many children. Though the writer does have him say, multiple times, that "the children are waiting," it doesn't have those implications (which I think, also, would've been far more engaging to children than a random hold-up by a bandit).

It's also unclear what Luis is doing, especially if you do read the biographical note. The main text makes it seem like Luis is just giving away his books, when the reality is that he developed a kind of library system that focuses primarily on people with limited or no access to books. The library building that is part of this project is located right next to his house and contains thousands of books, many of which were donated to him from people all over. This library's construction was finished in 2009, and I point this out because the book was published in 2011; this is something that could've easily been included and made a more coherent "true story."

I also get this kind of frustrating moral lesson from the book that a lot of older people do to children, and it's reminiscent of the ways in which my parents would always harass me about finishing all of the food on my plate because "there are children starving in Africa." Rather than really focusing on Luis's life and his work toward building the Biblioburro, it practically does the "some children have no books to read, so you should feel lucky that you have them" lesson. I'm not overly comfortable with that for a range of reasons, and I can't help feeling like that's something that kids will walk away with either as an indirect lesson or a direct lesson (especially if this is taught within the realm of a classroom, as I can almost certainly recognise precisely where teachers would point this out to their "ungrateful" students).

For some of the youngest readers that I've worked with, this is one that they've enjoyed (especially once I got the right rhythmic patter down). They generally like the rhymes, and they generally like the adorable little party that the other animals have the bear's cave.

I usually go through these books to try to find things that might interest students, and this one was... not a hit? And that's not surprising to me because of where it comes from. When I start seeing these books coming out of DK, I always instinctively cringe but still try them just in case; their books often are the ones that kids bring to me from their schools and complain about because they're so boring (trite, common knowledge, etc), so it's pretty understandable that even the ones aimed at the youngest readers aren't well-liked, either.

Another thing I don't like about DK books is this (from their Wikipedia page):

Most of the company's books are published with "DK" named as the author, as they are produced by teams of editors, designers and cartographers who work with freelance writers and illustrators.

It seems peculiar to me that somehow these kinds of books would not just be attributed to their writers; I struggle to understand how this book was produced by more than three people (two writers and an illustrator), but it also reads like something that was written by consensus and without the actual target audience in mind.

DK has always had this problem where their books don't read like they're for anyone; they just exist to fill a niche for teachers in an inoffensive way.

Normally, when I've worked with kids and reading books about numbers and counting, they've been kind of boring and predictable. This one actually seems to be somewhat useful in that kids can recognise that the numbers are wrong (e.g., when Lola is counting, she's counting out of order but still coming to the right answer — this is something reminiscent of one of the books in Louis Sachar's Wayside School series), and it's set in a situation that feels both funny and familiar.

Overwhelmingly, I rather enjoyed having a historiography and exploration of orientalism presented to me in this form. There were chunks of it that I found massively intriguing and connections I either hadn't previously thought to make or been introduced to that I appreciate learning about.

My one major problem with this book is how much of it is in French or German (but mostly French) without a translation anywhere, which is something that I find perplexing because of how often this book is touted as being the "most accessible" resource on orientalism. Similarly, it often jumps into certain sources as if there is an expectation to have engaged with them; this is something else I'm not super fond of, even if it did prompt me to look into them further as I was reading. But it made for moments where I felt like I couldn't really lock-in and focus on the book.

While I really have enjoyed the rest of the series (which I've been slowly reading with one of my students over the course of the past year), this book finally gave some of the spotlight to Trellis. He has been, for the past few books, the one character where I've felt like I cannot understand or recognise his motivations.

For a while, I found him interesting, and I rather liked how he shifted from his original aggressive behaviour to a more calm demeanor that helped him get to know and work with Emily. He still has his issues, some of which are caused by the in-world discrimination (which feels very muddy because it's like a bunch of people are being punished for the fear that others have of the elf king) and are not things that are his own personal fault. (It also doesn't help that he is the son of the current elf king, even if he is working against his own father. But still, the discrimination toward elves is core to others who are just... ordinary people, not only part of the monarch's family.)

This time, we at least get a glimpse back at Trellis through his memories, and we start understanding him a little bit better. We get to spend some time with the antagonist (first) and then Trellis (second), which provides us some more information on the world of the elves. It's still not enough for me because I think Trellis's backstory could've been its own whole story and that there is a lot more left unsaid in all of the books (and much of it should've been said), but... I appreciate finally getting to spend time with him in the story.

I'm always on the lookout for random detective novels, especially those that have some interesting aspect that I haven't seen before. This one is interesting because it is set during the 1920s-1930s of the Soviet Union, and part of it includes some of the internal struggles that a person undergoes as they recognise that the party apparatchiks and leaders were not actually engaging with the plans that they claimed would've supported every Soviet citizen (unfortunately a police officer, though his position appears to change over the course of the book).

It's an uncommon setting and structure, and I really like that part of the problem that comes up over and over again is how Vasya's own bosses and "subordinates" (they are in name only) continually impede his ability to investigate the case he's working on in multiple ways (removing evidence, accidentally destroying it, sending him somewhere else, and trying to scare him out of researching something.

I will say that the solution isn't... satisfactory to me? Mostly because it's barely choreographed and feels like it comes out of nowhere; there was some choreographing, but considering where my attention was focused for most of the novel? I wouldn't have even thought of that as being the answer; it makes sense, but I guess the author wanted readers to feel like Vasya did when he learned who the killer was.

As a story, I really liked it and did find it very intriguing. As a detective story, I felt like I was missing being able to solve the clues as the book went (and that's the part of detective stories I love; I want to participate in the puzzle).

This is yet another book where I've read it primarily from the perspective of a person looking for resources to support students' learning of English, and this is yet another book where I've found it was written... as if it was meant to be an educational book that "doesn't feel" like an educational book (except it does). Then, I look up the publisher where the book resides, and I keep finding them to be educational publishers (or closely related to educational publishers).

This is not an inherent problem except that these books are highly formulaic and repeat the exact same basic structures over and over. These structures aren't used to do anything except create recognisable patterns; they almost never utilise any other storytelling mechanic that could impart information and often just silently and indirectly teach children the "proper" way to give or receive information.

As for the story, it's... okay. There are aspects that I'm not comfortable with (minimising sexual harassment/assault, which does happen in one area where Zeus pins a woman to the ground and then asks for a kiss) while also glossing over aspects of the stories in order to mostly sanitise them beyond the 'common knowledge' aspects.

That's the other issue; it's all just the most common things, with no attempts to go beyond that. That's usually another tell that a book is part of an 'educational' series that is designed to be educational (even without seeing all the glossaries in the back). And again, I don't have problems with books being educational or prompting learning, but books designed for the explicit purpose of being used in an educational setting definitely seem to lack an audience to write for (or rather, that audience is usually "educational publishers" instead of anyone who should learn from it).

One of the things I like about this story is its structure, which isn't a super common way of writing children's books. It's written in the format of multiple letters from the same little girl (Lydia Grace). First, she writes to her Uncle Jim prior to moving in with him while her father looks for work during 1935; second, she writes mostly to her grandmother (but also her parents) while living with her uncle.

I kind of think this format could be used more and provide interesting narratives for kids to read. None of the letters come across forced; they feel very much like something a child would say.