Category: The Kids Are All Right

Eva wants to plant a garden in this adorable new picture book, but a rabbit eats her plants! This makes her sad, but when she follows the rabbit to nearby trees, she finds a little rabbit den with baby rabbits. It’s hard to stay mad at baby bunnies. As Eva plants a new garden, she gets another special surprise. A new baby sister! I loved this super sweet, lyrical picture book. While it doesn’t explicitly relate to Easter, the rabbits plus the fertility theme definitely made me think of Easter. The family is mixed race.

This lyrical, joyful board book is the perfect spring read for babies and toddlers. The story follows a diverse group of toddlers exploring a spring day, from blowing bubbles to mucking about in the mud to bathtime and finally bedtime. It’s a sweet board book with vibrant illustrations.

This hilarious picture book is my daughter’s favorite on the list. It follows the squirrel and bird duo from The Leaf Thief as spring arrives. One day Squirrel spies a flower between his tree and bird’s, but a little more on his side. He decides the flower is his and nearly smothers it to death. Bird let’s Squirrel know that wildflowers don’t belong to any one person (or creature), and the next day Squirrel finds the whole field full of flowers.

Opal is excited to join a birdhouse building contest. She’s going to construct the fanciest, most original birdhouse ever! But every birdhouse she makes is a flop, so she instead goes for a more traditional style. She’s sad when she loses the contest, but she gets the best reward of all when a bluebird chooses her house to make a nest in. I love books that decentralize the importance of winning and instead focus on process, like this one.

In this unique book that combines science, poetry, and art, readers will be gifted with fascinating information about trees — from their genesis as tiny seeds to their growth over decades to be giants.

In this beautiful book filled with vibrant paintings, a young girl lives among the baobab trees and takes care of them, just like her dad and grandma did before her. She enjoys watching the birds that shelter in the tree branches and stretches her arms high to imitate the trees. This is a joyful book about land stewardship!

This book cover makes me smile! In this story, a daisy is told by a rose that she’s just a weed. The rose tells the daisy that she is always in the way and not stunning like the other flowers around her. But Daisy learns that her part in the garden is so much more and finds her own purpose and beauty in the world.

When a young girl visits her family in the city, she finds that a handful of seeds can transform a dirt patch in the middle of a dense housing area into a beautiful and nourishing garden for everyone to enjoy! This book is inspired by the author’s own experience as a child.

My personal favorite hospital book we’ve checked out is this very informative and accessible nonfiction by a doctor. Dr. Nwora takes readers on a tour of the hospital, from x-rays and the cafeteria, to intensive care units and giving birth. In each area, she highlights a human story, like a couple giving birth, or a child with a broken arm. It’s a really fascinating, comprehensive nonfiction.

In this leveled reader, a girl accompanies her family to the emergency room after her brother leaps off of the top bunk of their bed and breaks his arm. There, she meets many doctors and learns there are a lot of different kinds. This is a great way for kids to learn more about doctors.

I love it when a favorite series covers a current topic of interest. My daughter literally screamed in delight when we found an Owl Diaries book where Eva visits the hospital! Eva injures her wing while playing wingball, and has to go to the hospital. There, she meets another juvenile owl patient from another town and the two become fast friends. Meanwhile, the local carnival is beginning, and Eva is worried about whether or not she and the other owls in the hospital will be able to attend. This illustrated chapter book is as charming and entertaining as the rest of the series.

Acclaimed author/illustrator Jason Chin astounds again in his space-themed nonfiction book. He examines perspective, astronomy, and astrophysics…not a small feat for a picture book and yet he does so with such skill and beauty. This book won the Cook Prize!

This fun, interactive book challenges kids to take rare space objects from around the world and place them in the appropriate exhibition areas of a space museum.

I love this story that brings to light the amazing work that Black female mathematicians contributed to United States space history. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden all played pivotal roles in helping NASA achieve its goals, and they did it all while overcoming gender and racial barriers.

Isn’t this cover so beautiful? I love all of Jasmine’s books, but this one is incredibly special. When a Mars rover is launched into space, the rover knows he has a job to do. But when he starts developing human emotions, he wonders if he will be good enough to complete the mission. He knows so many people are counting on him, and Mars is much more difficult to navigate than he originally thought.

Like a lot of newsletter readers I imagine, I loved A Wrinkle in Time when I was a kid, at least partially because I shared a name with the protagonist, though mostly because it’s such a magical book. This picture book written by L’Engle’s granddaughter frames Madeleine L’Engle’s biography with her love of asking questions. Writing came to be the way she set about answering and exploring the answers.

This is one of the most beautiful picture book biographies I’ve ever read, from the stunning illustrations to the moving biographical poems. Watson chronicles Angelou’s life from her joyful but also traumatic childhood through her adulthood, ending when Angelou recited a poem at Bill Clinton’s inauguration. As a content warning, one poem does address Angelou’s childhood sexual assault, though it doesn’t detail specifically what happened. I had a chance to hear Angelou speak a few years before her death, and it was such an amazing experience.

As a child, Jane Austen delighted in telling funny stories to her family about the people they encountered, and that mischievous storytelling spark would later form the basis for her novels. This lovely picture book depicts Jane’s humor and where she found inspiration for her stories, and can help young writers experiment with their own storytelling style! I still have the battered copy of her complete works on my bookshelf, a gift from my mother in my early teens.

This picture book bio about Zora Neale Hurston is such a good read aloud, with prose as vivid as the illustrations. As a child, Hurston’s mother told her to jump at the sun. Williams uses that phrase as a refrain as Hurston’s joy for folklore and storytelling sends her jumping off toward college and talking to everyone to learn their stories. I studied her folklore collections in grad school, and I loved how this focused on her love of folklore.

This sweet (see what I did there?) picture book by Christina Tosi, the creator of the bakery Milk Bar, is about Sammi, a young girl who lives in Samesville and is tired of everything being so boring and dull in her town. When she goes to bed with a recipe card under her pillow, she wakes up to a town that is bolder and brighter and more colorful! And it’s a perfect place to bake a bold and bright and colorful cake with her friends!

Zoe Washington really wants to prove to her parents that she is a good enough baker to audition for Food Network’s Kids Bake Challenge. But when a letter arrives on her twelfth birthday from her father, her life is upended. Her dad has been in prison, and in his letter he says he’s been falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Can Zoe believe him? And if what he’s saying is true, is there anything she can do to help? Be sure to check out the sequel, On Air with Zoe Washington!

This charming picture book by the award-winning couple Anika Denise and Christopher Denise is about a group of young bears who spend the day baking with their grandmother. The illustrations are so sweet and capture that warmth and love that is unique to a grandmother’s kitchen!

These illustrations just make me smile! LouAnn is getting ready for winter, and she is making one final batch of doughnuts. Friends, lured to her home by the smell of fresh doughnuts, partake in the festivities. LouAnn makes more and more doughnuts until she realizes that her cupboard is totally empty…and winter is coming!

Can a book get any more fun? Readers can sing and dance along to this delightful riff on “The Wheels on the Bus” starring several drag queens with fantastic names: Mother Lucy Goosey, Cinderfella, Rita Booke, and more. With vibrant colors and catchy lyrics, this is a book you should expect to read many times. Also check out the second book in the series — If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It.

With Wig on, the young B.B. Bedazzle is more than ready for a local drag competition. However, when B.B. arrives, she’s no longer as confident in winning. Everyone looks so fabulous! But Wig does help B.B. feel confident, and when Wig blows off in the wind, it helps audience members feel like they can embrace their wildest dreams, too. This is a really imaginative, joyful picture book.

It’s storytime at the library. When the kids aren’t looking, librarian Mr. Stephen sneaks out and, in a few minutes, Ms. Stacks appears. She’s everyone’s favorite storytime leader. She’s exciting and so good at performing the books! The kids have a blast, but they also love Mr. Stephen, who reappears after storytime, though clever readers will realize he was there the entire time.

This wonderfully informative book talks about what goes on with your body’s waste — how you produce it and what happens when it leaves your body. The book also discusses the impact of human waste as well as surprising uses of urine throughout history. This is a great book for kids who are always asking the big questions that no adult can ever answer.

When plastic bags became ubiquitous in Gambia, so did the amount of trash. Suddenly, plastic bags were everywhere, polluting streets and schools and farm land. Isatou Ceesay saw this happening in her neighborhood and decided to do something about all the garbage, and in turn made a powerful impact on her community.

I know that I have a lot of questions about where all of our garbage goes, and Rebecca Donnelly does an excellent job answering all of those niggling thoughts you might have about trash, waste, and what happens after the garbage truck picks it up. Donnelly tells us just how bad our garbage problem is, and what we can do to prevent so much waste from polluting our environment.

In Cateura, Paraguay, a community lives next to an enormous landfill and most jobs involve digging through the trash to find items to recycle. Music teacher Favio Chavez wanted to bring more music to the young people in the community, but he didn’t have instruments. He wondered whether he could build instruments out of recycled materials, and he could! I saw a documentary about this community many years ago and met some of the young musicians who were a part of this “recycled orchestra” — it was a beautiful experience.

This is the first board book in a series by Foreman and Bowers and while I enjoy all of them, I must admit this first one is still my favorite. With simple, poetic text, it celebrates Black hair as four girls with different hair types get ready. Also check out the other books in the series: Glow, Bloom, and Ours.

I’m surprised I haven’t reviewed this book yet because it was one of my favorite picture books of 2022. It’s an intergenerational, rhythmic read aloud centering Black disabled joy. Emmalene, who is blind and uses a cane, loves listening to all the songs the city sings, but her distracted Grandma Jean doesn’t want to pause and listen. In vibrant, evocative language, Emmalene describes what she hears to her grandmother on the way to church until Grandma Jean finally stops, listens, and hears the songs.

Fourth grader Miles Lewis comes from a family of skaters, so when his teacher announces the class will be taking a field trip to an ice skating rink to learn about physics, he’s excited. He knows the perfect person to ask ice skating tips from: his Nana. This is especially important after his friend R.J. bets that Miles will wipe out, and they set up a friendly challenge. However, Miles has one big worry hanging over his head: his Nana lives with Miles and his parents, but she might be moving out. This is the first book in a fantastic STEM-themed chapter book series. Check out Kelly Starling Lyons’ other children’s books too, which all center Black joy.

This middle grade novel has another week until it releases but I finished it recently and really wanted to share it. It entwines the comic book format with prose chapters and would be great for kids who are struggling a bit to transition into reading all-prose books. It’s about two brothers with very active, and very destructive, imaginations. When their parents hire a new babysitter in the form of the strict, gold-toothed Ms. Joyce, the boys immediately cast her as the villain in their pretend play. But is she really that villainous?

The words in this picture book were originally written as lyrics to a song composed for the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth and performed with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Now paired with gorgeous illustrations by Monica Mikai, this book tells the story of a family, forcibly enslaved, who helped build homes and cultivate the lands for families that were not their own. But the family is resolved to build their own lives, their own homes, and claim their song.

Three young girls wait every night for their father to return from work and tell them a story about his homeland of Palestine. Sometimes he tells a story about his trips to the market with his family, and sometimes he tells a story about how he helped cut vegetables at the family cafe. Even though the girls know they might only know Palestine through their father’s stories, they hold his tales close to their heart.

A young girl lives in a city, and her mom has a job where she has to work late and travel. Thankfully, the young girl has places to go where she is showered with love and warmth — a different house and a different “Big Mama” for every day of the week.