Sorting Through Spring

K-Gr 3—Flatt and Barron's effort suffers from a bit of an identity crisis, as the highlighted math skills are rather sophisticated, but the children who can navigate the concepts of sorting, patterns, and ratios will likely be turned off by the cute representations of wildlife and nature. One of the jewel-colored spreads shows a father fox on the hunt for his family's dinner while varying numbers of potential prey frolic nearby, and readers are asked whether the dinner is "impossibly, unlikely, likely, or certainly" going to be a vole, gray squirrel, rabbit, or cat. Those are fairly challenging words for budding readers, much less budding mathematicians. Also, examples of the concepts presented are not included. Supplemental information focuses on the biology of the animals featured in the main text. Younger kids will delight in Barron's gorgeous cut-paper collage artwork, and they'll learn a little bit from the basic information at the book's conclusion, but this volume will have a hard time fitting in the 510s when it seems more suited to the picture-book shelves.—Alyson Low, Fayetteville Public Library, AR