The full-color illustrations, softly textured with colored pencil and watercolor washes and enhanced with crisp digital shapes, emphasize the antic energy of the pair, creating distinctly readable expressions through posture, beak, and snout.

BCCB

There’s plenty to enjoy in this friendship guided by compromise, which gains added cheeriness from Palacios’s full-color illustrations.

Publishers Weekly

The authors effectively use common childhood experiences to share several important messages about caring, empathy, compromise, and what it means to look out for a friend. Children will easily relate to Agnes and Clarabelle's feelings and experiences, and parents/teachers will appreciate the positive messages of friendship and caring.

- Kendra Hall-Kenyon, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education, Brigham Young University,

Read & Bloom will be wildly popular. And I am very happy to see some new friendship books come along with the end of the Elephant and Piggie books.

- Teri Lesesne, Professor of Library Science at Sam Houston State University,

Funny and appealing, the Read & Bloom books will charm readers.

- Linda M. Pavonetti, Ed.D., professor of Reading and Language Arts at Oakland University,