Rounds: Franklin Frog by Barry and Emma Tranter (Nosy Crow, August 2012) is a great interactive nonfiction app for one- to three-year-olds. First in Nosy Crow’s new series of nonfiction apps based on life cycles, Franklin Frog presents the life of a frog — including feeding, hibernation, mating, birth, metamorphosis, and maturation — in an [...]

I saw Disney’s animated movie Tangled when it came out in theaters and since then have seen it countless times. I once watched it eight times in two days. Imagine my delight when I got to play Tangled Storybook Deluxe App (Disney Digital Books, February 2012). Alas, the story doesn’t translate too smoothly to this [...]

The star of Benji Davies’s Bizzy Bear board book series and the Bizzy Bear On the Farm app returns in Bizzy Bear Builds a House (Nosy Crow, July 2012). Based on Bizzy Bear: Let’s Get to Work, this app invites toddlers to pitch in around a construction site with Bizzy, completing tasks such as digging [...]

Caillou Stickers! (Night & Day Studios and Cookie Jar Entertainment, July 2012) is a straightforward digital sticker book for the preschool set. Users select one of seven backgrounds such as a schoolyard, birthday party, campsite, and park, then drag and drop brightly colored images of well-known PBS character Caillou, his friends, family, pets, and toys [...]

At the meeting when the Horn Book staff decided starred reviews for the May/June Magazine issue, we read aloud Marianne Dubuc’s picture book Animal Masquerade. It took a good fifteen minutes (each one of them absolutely delightful). The app In Front of My House (Winged Chariot, 2011) based on Dubuc’s book of the same title, [...]

In Bobo Explores Light by Game Collage (September 2011; updated June 2012), Bobo, a cute robot with an appropriately light bulb–like head, is our guide for a quick trip through the solar system toward the sun—and from there, onto a discussion of light in its many forms. Bobo takes users on a roughly chronological review [...]

Being a big Disney/Pixar fan, I went to see the new movie Brave on opening weekend. Brave is the story of Merida, an independent, archery-loving young Scottish princess who longs to control her own destiny despite her mother’s wish to marry her off. When a magic spell Merida buys from a witch turns her mother [...]

Pip and Posy: Fun and Games (Nosy Crow, April) is based on Axel Scheffler’s picture book series featuring the two young friends. In the books, Posy, a mouse, and Pip, a rabbit, help each other navigate “the dramas of toddler life” such as learning to share, coping with “accidents,” and working out disagreements. As the [...]

Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral’s young adult novel Chopsticks (Penguin/Razorbill, February 2012) tells the story of seventeen-year-old piano prodigy Gloria Fleming. Lonely Glory seems to have little in her life but her music and her demanding father/teacher; her mother died several years ago. Then Frank Mendoza, a recent arrival from Argentina, moves in next door, [...]