And the Good Brown Earth, by Kathy Henderson

I love to garden, so a book that talked about the changing seasons from the point of view of a garden really appealed to me. I like anything I can do to get my kids more interested in gardening. Unfortunately, the execution fell a bit flat. I enjoyed the book, but the kids were much less into it, and didn't warm up on multiple reads. We ended up returning it to the library early.

The storyline is fairly simple and sweet: Joe and his Gram go to the vegetable patch in every season, and Gram does the proper garden chore while Joe "helps". In the end, they have a bountiful harvest.

My first real issue with the book is that the sentence structure and language is sometimes a bit awkward. The main refrain, repeated over and over, is, "And the good brown earth got on with doing what the good brown earth does best." Although nicely poetic, I think it was hard for young ears to parse quickly.

The pictures were beautiful, but much too indistinct for a children's book. There were many pages where it took some thought to decipher what was happening in the pictures, and that was with the help of the text to decipher it. My children wouldn't spend much time looking at the pictures they couldn't understand.

This book may be a better fit for reading to older children, in the 6-8 range, but I would not recommend it for children under five.