oxes? How scary can that get? Answer: Hoo-boy. Hold onto your hats folks. Turns out, what terrifies a fox can terrify a child just as easily. For some readers the fact that everyone here sports red fur will make the horrors a little better. For others, much much worse.
Maybe I’m a little envious of Kelly Starling Lyons. She knows how to write a killer book. Plus she got paired with the incomparable Daniel Minter, so right there. Right there. But really, I have no time to be envious of anyone. I’m using that time instead to be just so darn grateful this book exists at all. Family rendered in its most beautiful light. A treasure in hand indeed.
Do you remember that scene in Orlando by Virginia Woolf where a bunch of witty people are in a room saying witty things and then Alexander Pope walks in and says three things so devastatingly witty that he just destroys everything? That’s what happens when Climbing Shadows gets paired alongside other collections of poetry. Smart. Honestly heartfelt. Utterly beautiful to look at. See the bar? Yeah. It just got raised.
“I am Fly. Maximillian Fly. I am a good creature. I am not bad, as some will tell you.” Considering that Maximillian is a human/cockroach hybrid of sorts, this is not particularly surprising news. Meet the dystopian/Steampunk/action adventure novel that’s like nothing you’ve ever read before.
Today I look at an infinitely gentle take on the feelings we lug around inside of ourselves and why we don’t have to always lug them on our own. Maybe Tomorrow? is, at its heart, about how to be a good friend. A seemingly simple lesson for a deeply complex world.
The ideal use of great writing without cheating. Filled with facts and backmatter, it also makes the subject interesting to kids. It’s beautiful to look at and while I would have made some changes, it stands as a pretty darn good look at a man, a plan, a crayon. Crayola.
With Trace, Ms. Cummings takes time to examine what we owe our ancestors, even as we try to live our daily lives. We live with their decisions, whether we want to or not, and sometimes we relive their mistakes. This is a ghost story that asks you to stop and listen to the voices that are dead but not gone. Who are the ghosts that haunt your story? And what are they trying to tell you?
A book that effectively establishes normality, disrupts it with horror, and then assures the reader that normality can return. If Tsurumi’s previous picture book, Accident, was about taking responsibility for your mistakes, Crab Cake is about taking care of yourself when the mistake is not your own.
Blisteringly honest with a respect for young readers that is sadly uncommon, Jerry Craft has created something revolutionary: An everyday black boy in a comic for kids.
There are books for kids that dare to be more thoughtful than pulse pounding. If chosen freely by a child, they can unlock something inside. Something that means more to the person reading than anyone else. The Line Tender carries this promise in its pages. It’s the right book for the right reader.
The Girl and the Wolf by Métis author Katherena Vermette and Cree- Métis artist Julie Flett, is an original fairytale in the purest sense of the term. Essentially, it takes a European idea and flips it on its head. A book that cracks the limitations of the fairy tale form wide open.
We think about aliens all the time and what they might be like. Imagine actually finding other planets where they might live. That’s what Just Right does. It allows for the scope of possibility, even as its very message about the difficulty in finding planets like our own reinforces the fact that this place is pretty special.
Here’s an idea: Why not take the idea of a world gone mad and give it a jolt of lightning to the veins? Set your book in another era when America went a little crazy, then liven things up with spies, car chases, murder attempts, gunshots, traitors, double agents, and that’s just the first few chapters! A book for the kids that want to read a response to our age that will thrill them to the core, and maybe plant a couple of seeds of rebellion in their craniums at the same time.
You have other books about emotions that you love, I have no doubt, but seriously consider supplementing them with Rash’s latest. A loving little book unafraid to be happy, sad, angry, scared, and supremely good.
Simler has previously wowed American audience with such books as Plume and the magnificent The Blue Hour. Now, thanks in part to the elegant translation by Sarah Ardizzone, she has crafted a new kind of bedtime book. One rooted in poetry, dreams, seasons, fuzzy noses, lilting words, and a type of scratch art never before made possible.
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