In the 1940s, a girl and her younger brother are sent from their home in a Polish ghetto to live with a Christian couple in the countryside. Born as Mira, Ana must change her identity to blend into her new home, while 3-year-old Daniel becomes Oskar. After the war, a Jewish woman kidnaps the children, as well as many others, and takes them on a long, difficult journey to a kibbutz in Israel so they can be raised in the Jewish faith.
While many books have been written about children transported to various places for safety during World War II, Jennifer Rosner’s moving, well-researched second novel takes a penetrating look at the myriad murky moral choices involved and the lives of these children after the war, including their lasting sense of displacement, confusion and conflicting allegiances. Fans of Rosner’s award-winning debut novel, The Yellow Bird Sings—about a Jewish mother and daughter hiding in Poland during World War II—will be pleased to see the author exploring these related strands of history.
Rosner follows Ana and Oskar for decades, revealing the ways their age difference affected their very disparate responses to their turbulent early lives. Meanwhile, she also explores the stories of two other characters: Roger, a Jewish boy taken to a Catholic convent in 1940s France but later sent to live with extended family in Jerusalem; and Renata, a postgraduate archaeology student at Oxford University, who is excited to be on an excavation in 1968 Jerusalem.
Each of these characters must reckon with secrets and the often unintended consequences of their pasts. At first, it’s puzzling to understand how Renata’s 1968 life relates to those of Roger, Ana and Oskar, but by the book’s conclusion, the connection is clear. Rosner does an excellent job of not judging the actions that adults take on behalf of her child characters while also deeply exploring the consequences.
“Maybe there is no real home for a person who has been passed mother to mother to mother,” muses Ana in the 1960s. An excellent choice for book clubs, Once We Were Home gives readers much to ponder.
Fans of Jennifer Rosner’s award-winning debut novel, The Yellow Bird Sings—about a Jewish mother and daughter hiding in Poland during World War II—will be pleased to see the author explore some related strands of history.
Imagine if you could travel around the world in a single instant. If you began in Australia at 10 a.m. and went to Brazil, it would already be 8 p.m. there! Author Nicola Davies and illustrator Jenni Desmond follow two children on one such magical journey across time zones in One World. Along the way, the pair witness a variety of wild animals and learn about the threats that climate change poses to the creatures.
As the book opens, two children huddle together in a blanket fort in their Greenwich, U.K., bedroom, using a flashlight to look at a book. A clock on the wall shows that the time is about 11:45 p.m. Davies offers a brief, helpful introduction to the concept of time zones, then, as midnight arrives, whisks the pair out their bedroom window and off to Svalbard, Norway. There, it’s 1 a.m., and a family of polar bears are hunting for seals.
With each stroke of midnight back in Greenwich, readers instantly travel to a new time zone, where they discover a new species. At 8 a.m. in the Philippines, we see whale sharks “gulping plankton into mouths the size of trash cans.” We visit a mob of kangaroos at 10 a.m. in the scorching Australian Outback, marvel at emperor penguins at noon in Antarctica and more. Every spread discusses dangers to habitats, such as pesticides and deforestation, or protections needed, including anti-poaching measures and the development of alternative energy sources. Davies is careful to depict both the harmful and helpful impacts that humans can have.
The two children, one wearing a yellow nightgown with blue bunny slippers and the other clad in red- and white-striped pajamas, are keen observers. They hang upside down with a sloth in Ecuador, nestle in the petals of a wildflower in California and float alongside humpback whales in the ocean near Hawaii. Their bright clothing ensures that they stand out in every scene.
After soaring over plastic-filled seas and a brightly lit metropolis, the children return home. It’s the first hour of Earth Day, and Davies urges readers to “think of all the wonders that we’ve seen,” then “shout them out . . . and tell the sleepers to WAKE UP because tomorrow is already here.” Filled with informative prose and stunning art, One World delivers on its creative concept and leaves readers with not only a sense of awe at our planet’s remarkable biodiversity but also newfound feelings of respect and responsibility.
This book leaves readers with not only a sense of awe at our planet’s remarkable biodiversity but also newfound feelings of respect and responsibility.
The photograph taken after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the Lorraine Motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, is one of the most recognizable of the 20th century. As the civil rights leader lay dying, people nearby pointed to something out of frame while one man knelt at King’s side. The photo captures a tragic moment in history, but for Leta McCollough Seletzky, the image is particularly haunting—because her father was the one trying to administer first aid. As she writes in her absorbing memoir, The Kneeling Man, “For my family, the assassination was a lifelong wound, something we didn’t touch for fear of aggravating it.”
Seletzky wasn’t born until eight years after King’s death, and her parents split up when she was 3. Her father, Marrell “Mac” McCollough, took a job with the CIA, moved to Washington, D.C., and didn’t see much of his daughter. As an adult, however, Seletzky began questioning him about his life, especially about his time working for the Memphis Police Department before she was born. In 2015, she began an intensive interviewing, research and writing project that resulted in this account, which not only chronicles her father’s life but also reckons with his role in history.
Mac was the ninth of 12 children born to parents who rented 40 acres of Mississippi farmland from a white man who lived in Memphis. Growing up, his focus was on getting his high school diploma and then his college degree, goals that were not easily achieved. At the time of King’s assassination, Mac was 23 years old and beginning to take part-time college classes while working as an undercover cop to infiltrate a group of Black activists called the Invaders. Seletzky’s detailed yet fluid prose shapes her father’s story into a compelling narrative arc—beginning with his birth in Mississippi and ending with his 1999 retirement from the CIA—while holding space for her to grapple with Mac’s history as a Black man spying on Black Power activists for the police.
While Seletzky keeps the focus on her father’s story, his experiences and observations make intriguing contributions to the MLK assassination canon. For example, Mac observed that the bullet that killed Dr. King exploded on impact, which is the sort of technology he believed wasn’t sold in gun stores at that time. When Seletzky told civil rights activist Andrew Young that she wanted to know what really happened that night, he advised, “No, you don’t.” In a later conversation, he indicated that he wasn’t convinced that James Earl Ray, King’s convicted killer, was the one who pulled the trigger.
Near the end of her book, Seletzky admits, “I’d jumped into Dad’s story not knowing what I’d find and afraid of what I might uncover.” Thankfully she persevered, growing closer to her father in the process. The Kneeling Man will enlighten generations to come about a pivotal, disturbing moment in our nation’s history.
For Leta McCollough Seletzky, the famous photo of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is particularly haunting—because her father was the one trying to administer first aid.
This Is the Planet Where I Live is the perfect way to jump-start a young environmentalist’s education. Its eye-catching illustrations will capture the reader’s attention, and its lively text will hold it. This is the sort of book that grows alongside children, gaining broader, deeper meanings as their comprehension develops.
Author K.L. Going writes in rhythmic, occasionally rhyming cumulative verse that focuses on connections. “Here are the people / who share the planet / where I live,” she begins. On the next spread, she continues, “These are the homes / that shelter the people / who share the planet / where I live.” Page by page, Going explores the links between humans, animals, insects, birds, trees, clouds and oceans, her plainspoken verses becoming more complex with each new addition. Finally, she concludes quite simply, “Animals, fields, / shelter for friends, / every creature alive / on each other depends— / all on the planet / where we live.”
Debra Frasier’s dazzling photo-collage art transforms Going’s text into a visual feast for the imagination. Her illustrations will remind many readers of her work in On the Day You Were Born, her beloved 1991 picture book that also makes wonderful use of planetary imagery and themes of interconnectedness. Here, repeated images of Earth and a sunflower-bright sun provide a grounding motif that echoes Going’s cumulative lines, helping young readers realize how all the things mentioned in Going’s text—included readers themselves—rely on one another.
Along the way, Frasier portrays fascinating variety within each category, such as fields of food that include tomatoes, broccoli, strawberries and onions, or birds such as goldfinches, geese, eagles and seagulls. Bright colors leap off the page, adding energy to every spread. Frequent use of swirls and spirals, which can be seen in clouds, landscapes and, notably, a large curlicue of birds looping in the air, reinforces the central notions of interdependence and the circle of life.
This Is the Planet Where I Live gloriously captures the teeming natural treasures of our beautiful, delicate world.
Accompanied by dazzling photo-collage art, this cumulative picture book captures the interconnectedness of life on our beautiful, delicate planet.
When Korean American author Julia Lee was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 2000s, her instructor cracked a joke about a dog who was taken to the back of a Korean restaurant and eaten. As her classmates laughed, she turned “hot with anger and shame.” Instead of confronting her teacher, the next day Lee wore a bright red “Angry Little Asian Girl” T-shirt to class. “In retrospect,” Lee writes, “putting on the T-shirt was a dumb way to protest, but it was the only way I could tell my teacher ‘fuck you.’”
Lee is now an associate professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, focusing on African American and Caribbean literature—and she is no longer silent. Her memoir, Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, seamlessly blends her own experiences with piercing discussions of identity and racial stratification, serving up conclusions likely to challenge readers across the ideological spectrum. In fact, recognizing the need for constant reexamination in our white-centered society, Lee even challenges her own views. At a 2018 academic conference, for instance, she realized, “My brain had calcified. I was resistant to change. Gender pronouns puzzled me. Land acknowledgments confused me. My immediate response was to react like lots of people do—blame it on woke culture run amok or mock how cringingly earnest my colleagues were. It was always other people’s fault that I felt uncomfortable—not mine.”
In sections titled “Rage,” “Shame” and “Grace,” Lee traces her intellectual evolution through the events of her own life. She demonstrates a knack for meaningful storytelling as she recounts her father’s harrowing escape from North Korea as a child, and her enrollment at a private all-girls school in a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood while her parents struggled to make ends meet. In L.A., Lee was “a little Asian girl, thrown against what Zora Neale Hurston calls a ‘sharp white background.’” In 1992, at age 15, she witnessed firsthand the riots that occurred after a jury acquitted four police officers for physically battering Rodney King during a traffic stop. Lee writes that it was a “primal scene of racial awakening—for myself and for the Korean American community. We were not white. We were not Black. We were caught somewhere in the middle.”
Later, as a Princeton undergraduate, Lee felt herself “drowning” amid a whole system “built upon whiteness and in service of whiteness.” Along the way, she contended with depression, culturally clueless therapists, an angry mother and feelings of isolation when she became a parent. At Harvard, she got what she calls “life-saving” advice from novelist Jamaica Kincaid: “You must bite the hand that feeds you,” meaning that she must dare to critique the culture of white supremacy even when that culture expects her to be grateful just for being allowed into elite spaces.
Biting the Hand is an exceptional account of an evolving understanding of power and privilege, offering readers insightful new ways to examine their world.
Julia Lee’s piercing discussions of Asian American identity are likely to challenge readers across the ideological spectrum. In fact, she even challenges her own views.
In Home Away From Home, Newbery Honor author Cynthia Lord returns to some of her signature storytelling themes: displacement, friendship, families, animals and summer. Fans of Rules, A Touch of Blue and Because of the Rabbit will enjoy learning about the intriguing animal at the novel’s center, a white gyrfalcon typically seen in the Arctic.
Eleven-year-old Mia loves visiting her grandmother in coastal Maine every summer, but things are different this year, because Mia’s mother isn’t joining her. She’ll be back in Ohio, getting their old house ready to sell, as she’s buying a new home with her boyfriend, Scott. Mia worries about leaving the only house she’s ever lived in and the possibility of having to change schools, even though her mom has promised she won’t have to.
Mia also isn’t sure she likes Cayman, the know-it-all neighbor boy who spends so much time with Grandma. Mia already must share Mom with Scott, and Dad has his new wife and baby, so “Grandma was the only person [Mia] didn’t have to share with anyone else.” But as Mia and Cayman’s friendship begins to gel, she realizes that he has problems of his own, including an absent father and a mother navigating alcoholism and depression.
When Mia and Cayman spot the magnificent gyrfalcon near an eagle nest, the novel’s action quickly ramps up. Mia posts a picture on a birding website, and soon numerous eager birdwatchers arrive, leading to disaster. Lord adeptly handles Mia’s parents’ concerns about her screen time and online activity, and the birding plotline excellently illustrates how a seemingly innocuous post can gain a life of its own. Mia feels horribly guilty about the ramifications of her post, and she identifies with the gyrfalcon, realizing that “she was young and a long way from home and maybe things would never be the same for her. And I knew exactly how that felt.”
Lord’s fluid prose and Mia’s lively, likable narration make Home Away From Home a riveting middle grade novel. Descriptions of the gyrfalcon as it soars near nesting eaglets transport readers to Maine’s rocky coast. Mia’s interactions with birdwatchers and a game warden add to the experience, while Mia’s, Grandma’s and Cayman’s attentions to a stray cat nicely bolster the displacement theme. Readers will be left feeling reassured, like Mia, who concludes: “This trip hadn’t been what I expected—and it kept surprising me. But even though change is scary, it brings new things, too.”
Fans of Rules, A Touch of Blue and Because of the Rabbit will enjoy learning about the intriguing animal at the center of Home Away From Home: a white gyrfalcon typically seen in the Arctic.
Matt James demonstrated his skill for writing about hard subjects in a reassuring way in The Funeral (2018), his first picture book as both author and illustrator. He does so again in Tadpoles, which follows a boy who ponders his own changing habitat as he explores a pond formed by rainfall with his father.
There’s no dearth of children’s books about the topics James explores here—divorce, changing seasons, the life cycles of frogs—but he nimbly imparts a fresh take on all three in an enticingly rich and thoughtful creation. Tadpoles is not quite a science book and not quite a divorce book, in the best possible ways.
James accomplishes this through the strong voice of his narrator. He establishes the boy’s conversation tone from the very first line: “A kid in my class says she saw a two-headed frog.” The boy reveals that his father disagrees: “My dad says . . . that Sita probably just saw two frogs.” The boy is experiencing all manner of changes, including the arrival of spring rains that create a huge puddle in a field near his school. The boy notes that the field contains “neat old junk that people just left lying around,” such as glass bottles, a rusty bicycle and an upright piano. There’s even an old farm silo, which prompts the boy to confess, “Once, when my dad first moved to his new place, I stood in the silo and yelled every single swear word that I know. I guess I was worried that he wouldn’t love me anymore, but my dad says that some things never change.”
James’ moody art is filled with dark clouds and a wide variety of raindrops, which readers will almost feel splattering against the pages. Flashes of pink, green and the bright yellow of the boy’s raincoat guide the eye as the boy and his father study the pond’s tadpoles and discuss their evolution in detail (endnotes offer additional information). Movement on every page—swimming tadpoles, swirling clouds, curlicues on the back of a metal chair and more—adds interest. The backdrop of ongoing transformation in both the natural and manmade worlds dovetails neatly with the boy’s reflections about his father and their relationship. James’ illustrations show that the neighborhood is changing too, with high-rise buildings and a construction crane near smaller homes and green spaces. As the book ends, the skies are clear and blue as the boy and his father head home. One of the book’s many strengths is James’ comfort with leaving things unsaid and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.
Tadpoles is a reassuring reminder that change can bring positive new developments, and that parental love remains constant, even amid great upheaval.
Tadpoles offers a reassuring reminder that parental love remains constant, even amid great upheaval.
What happens when dreams don’t pan out? That’s the question that Malcolm and Jess Gephardt both face after years of marriage in Mary Beth Keane’s engrossing fourth novel.
Like her bestselling 2019 novel, Ask Again, Yes, The Half Moon is set in the fictional town of Gillam, New York, modeled after Keane’s hometown of Pearl River. While the events of Ask Again, Yes spans 40 years, The Half Moon focuses on a week or so in the Gephardts’ lives, exploring how events of the past have led to their discontent and an ultimate reckoning.
Malcolm’s lifelong dream has been to own the Half Moon, the bar where he’s worked for years. He finally does, although menacing creditors are knocking at his door, and he doesn’t have the cash to transform it the way he’d like—years of futile fertility treatments have exhausted the couple’s savings. Early in the book, he muses that “middle age was looming and he could already see the headline that would arrive with it: that a person could be extraordinarily good at something and still fail at it.” And he is good—a gregarious guy who’s got the charm to manage any situation.
Jess is a lawyer, although her heart isn’t really in her career—or anything, for that matter. After moving out and away from Malcolm, she is trying to figure out next steps. In flashbacks, we learn that she has been increasingly attracted to Neil, a divorced lawyer who is the primary caregiver of his three young children and has recently moved to Gillam. In a struggle that seems quite real, Jess desperately tries to stave off these stirrings, wondering if it’s “possible to dance at the edge of a precipice and keep dancing for the rest of your life.”
Then a blizzard descends on Gillam, paralyzing the lives of its residents and emphasizing the feelings of entrapment felt by not only Malcolm and Jess but also a host of other wonderfully portrayed characters who work in and frequent the bar. As the story unfolds, the many fascinating behind-the-scenes details about running a bar range from heartbreaking to humorous. It’s a masterful setup, laid out in a careful, intriguing way. The disappearance of one of the bar’s patrons during the storm, lends a sense of urgency to the plot and adds a layer of impending doom that plays out in both emotional and physical terms.
Keane’s down-to-earth characters in Gillam are reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s wonderfully authentic Baltimore personalities. They’ll tug your heartstrings as they try to make their way through this world with steps forward, back and sideways.
Mary Beth Keane’s down-to-earth characters in Gillam are reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s wonderfully authentic Baltimore personalities.
The Midnight News is a tense, atmospheric thriller that’s unlike any World War II novel you’ve read before. British author Jo Baker has written a number of novels, including A Country Road, a Tree, set in Paris in 1939, and The Body Lies, a psychological tale of a woman recovering from a physical assault. Baker’s latest combines elements of both these novels, focusing on its 20-year-old heroine, Charlotte Richmond, who is fending for herself in London during the Blitz but feeling increasingly wary of a male stranger who seems to be stalking her.
As the novel opens, Charlotte’s beloved brother has been killed in the war, and she misses him terribly. Her mother is dead, she’s estranged from her father, sister and stepmother, and she’s supporting herself by working as a typist for the Ministry of Information. She lives in the attic of a walk-up apartment, from which she watches bombs drop over the city at night. Baker’s historical details convey the dreary dread that has taken over everyone’s life, especially Charlotte’s, during the Blitz, as bodies pile up, buildings fall down, and air raid sirens never seem to stop.
It becomes apparent that Charlotte has mental health issues: As her godmother explains, she “did a spell in the loony bin a while ago.” Charlotte entertains suicidal ideations, especially after several people she’s close to die in air raids. In fact, she becomes suspicious that these women were actually killed in some other way, probably by the ominous man she keeps seeing in the streets. She also hears a chorus of voices in her head; they are the people she has lost, and they give her advice and even talk to one another, often in highly amusing ways. It’s a narrative choice that is hard to pull off, especially in a sustained fashion, but Baker does so with panache.
To investigate the deaths, Charlotte enlists the help of a young man whose family runs an undertaking business. Tom has some physical challenges with his gait and one hand, and the war has made his university coursework uncertain. His family life is much less opulent than Charlotte’s was, and Baker explores these class differences, especially as the war exacerbates them.
The plot grows more and more tense, even wild, with few hints as to how things will play out—whether a serial killer is on the loose, or whether Charlotte is simply out of step with reality. Throughout, however, Baker is firmly in control, and voila, she pulls it off, wrapping up plotlines in surprising ways while returning The Midnight News to a war story, a love story and a commentary on social mores that remains relevant today.
Jo Baker’s plot grows more and more tense, even wild, with few hints as to how things will play out—whether a serial killer is on the loose, or whether Charlotte is simply out of step with reality.
When Greg Marshall and his childhood friend, Gretchen, ran for president and vice president of their high school class, they were something of an unconventional pair. Both were non-Mormons, making them a minority in Salt Lake City, Utah. Marshall had a pronounced limp and had yet to tell anyone he was gay, while Gretchen had a pacemaker “and a bone spur hanging off one foot like a sixth toe.” Marshall writes that their winning campaign strategy “was simple, and that was to make fun of ourselves.” Marshall takes that same winning approach in his stunning debut, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It.
Marshall’s limp in his right leg caused weakness and spasms throughout his life and required surgeries from time to time. He had actually been diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 18 months—but his parents never disclosed this fact, telling him instead that he had “tight tendons” and encouraging their son and other four children to simply rely on the mantra, “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GIVE UP.” Marshall didn’t discover the true origin of his mobility limitations until 2014, by accident, when applying for health insurance. “Every day growing up was like an ABC Afterschool Special in which no lessons were learned, no wisdom gleaned,” he writes.
In different hands, this memoir might have become a tragic family story, overshadowed by a mother who was diagnosed with cancer and required decades of treatment for that and other conditions, and a kindhearted, dad-joking father who died from Lou Gehrig’s disease when Marshall was 22. Instead, Marshall has written a riotously funny book that will grab your attention and steal your heart from the very first page. His writing brings to mind early David Sedaris, with its bitingly funny caricatures and descriptions, bathed in blistering commentary, deep-seated opinions, wit, intellect and, above all else, fierce family love. Additionally, Marshall details several of his sexual experiences—not to be salacious but to illuminate his ongoing quest for identity and relationships, despite his long-standing fear of contracting HIV. “As a gay man and a person with a disability, I come out every day,” he writes.
The Marshalls’ lives are full of twists, turns and surprises that will leave readers yearning for more, and this memoir serves as a love letter to all of them, especially Marshall’s late father. Rare is the book that makes me both laugh out loud and shed actual tears, but Leg made me do both.
Bitingly funny and full of blistering commentary and fierce familial love, Greg Marshall's memoir is a winning debut.
Christian Cooper has been bird-watching in Central Park for decades, but a spring migratory excursion took a dramatic turn on May 25, 2020, when a woman refused his request to leash her wandering dog, per park regulations. He was hoping to spy a ground-dwelling bird called a mourning warbler and knew that her unleashed pet would make his quest impossible. After she refused and Cooper began filming with his phone, Amy Cooper—a white woman of no relation—announced that she was about to call the police, adding, “I’m going to tell them that there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Her blatant use of “weaponized racism” went viral. As Cooper aptly sums up the incident in Better Living Through Birding, “Fourteen words, captured amid sixty-nine seconds of video, that would alter the trajectory of two lives.” This encounter happened on the same day George Floyd was murdered.
A year later, Cooper was invited to attend a birding festival in Alabama. As he walked across Selma’s infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, he reflected on the day that bridge became a bloodbath in 1965 and on the travails his ancestors must have endured. “In that context, my incident in Central Park is just an asterisk,” he writes. “More than a year later, it remains exceedingly strange for me—the notoriety, that I’d even be mentioned in the annals of the nation’s racial strife.”
Throughout his wide-ranging memoir, Cooper is a thoughtful, enthusiastic narrator. Growing up as a Black kid on Long Island, New York, in the 1970s, “I was rarer than an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in the very white world of birding,” he writes. “As I simultaneously struggled with being queer, birds took me away from my woes suffocating in the closet.” Cooper gradually came out to family and friends, beginning while studying at Harvard in the 1980s. He went on to become one of Marvel’s first openly gay writers and editors—aside from birds, his other passions include superhero comics and sci-fi and fantasy—and introduced the first gay male Star Trek character in the Starfleet Academy series. In entertaining prose, Cooper reminisces about his life, writing especially poignantly about his often-difficult relationship with his father.
Tying these multifaceted strands together is no easy feat, but Cooper does it well. He peppers the text with helpful tips for beginning birders while recounting vivid excursions through Nepal, the Galapagos, Australia and, of course, his beloved Central Park. Generous soul that he is, Cooper writes that outrage shouldn’t be focused on Amy Cooper. Instead, he concludes, “Focusing on her is a distraction and lets too many people off the hook from the hard, ongoing examination of themselves and their own racial biases. . . . If you’re looking for Amy Cooper to yell at, look in the mirror.”
In thoughtful prose, birder Christian Cooper reminisces about his life before and after the day a white woman threatened to call the police on him in Central Park.
Start off on the proverbial right foot with This Is the First Book I Will Read to You, in which a father celebrates the joys of reading with his newborn child. “I’ll be nervous,” he admits, “to share this moment that only you and I will be a part of.” As the father speaks, he gets the child ready for bed, walking through a house filled with loving family photographs. “You might not want to listen at first,” he continues. “But then we’ll find our way together.” Author Francesco Sedita’s sedate, pitch-perfect prose conveys the father’s jitters, but it’s dad’s quiet determination that rules the day.
Magenta Fox’s sweet digital illustrations are bathed in soft pinks and blues. As parent and child walk into the nursery and begin to read, Fox depicts the imaginative transformation that follows as wallpaper with a forest motif becomes an actual forest. Suddenly, father and baby are right there in a wooded clearing as an inquisitive squirrel looks on. It’s the perfect visual representation of the transportive power of books. As they keep reading, the pair ascend a hill, reach the sea and gaze up at the moon. “We have stories to discover and magical places to visit, you and I,” the father shares. “But tonight, this is the first book I’ll read to you.”
Sedita and Fox offer a gentle tribute to the strength of the parental bond and to all of the adventures, hopes and dreams that lie ahead.
★ The World and Everything in It
Kevin Henkes is widely known for his charming mouse characters, led by spunky Lilly of Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, as well as numerous children’s novels, including the Newbery Honor books Olive’s Ocean and The Year of Billy Miller. However, Henkes’ less rambunctious picture books, such as Old Bear, Waiting and The World and Everything in It are treasures that shouldn’t be missed. They sparkle like little gems as they impart a deep sense of understanding and appreciation of our world.
Henkes begins with a simple idea. “There are big things and little things in the world,” he writes. On the page opposite this text, we see an illustration of a large tree trunk with a small green sprout beside it. In subsequent pages, he explores this idea systematically through spot illustrations of “little animals,” “tiny flowers” and “pebbles.” There’s even an empty space captioned “things so small you can’t see them.” Henkes next turns to big things, such as the sun, moon and sea.
After that, he helps young readers begin to grasp where they fit in among all these big and small things. For instance, he notes that “the sea is big, but you can hold some of it in your hands.” And just like that, this talented literary magician seamlessly moves from straightforward statements of fact to a series of sentences that capture sublime wonders. “Most of the things are in-between,” he explains. “Like you. And me. And just about anything you can think of.”
Henkes’ illustrations are tightly focused, economical and free of distractions—just right for the very young. He closes by repeating “Everything is in the world,” and the phrase feels like a benediction that reminds readers of the endless delights, both big and small, awaiting them.
★ The Moon Remembers
Stories about the moon are a staple for the very young, from perennial favorites like Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon and Eric Carle’s Papa,Please Get the Moon for Me to new classics such as Jane Yolen and John Schoenherr’s Owl Moon and Floyd Cooper’s Max and the Tag-Along Moon. E.B. Goodale’s exceptional The Moon Remembers deserves a place among them.
The book’s endpapers show the black-and-white phases of a friendly-faced moon, adding a nice touch of reality to this anthropomorphic fantasy. As a round, almost full, smiling moon gazes lovingly down on a nude roly-poly brown-skinned baby, we read that “when a baby is born, the moon is there. The moon remembers.” In fact, the moon remembers all babies, including your parents, and not just human babies: It shines its light down on baby crickets, rabbits, owls, flowers and trees. In a spread sure to find great favor, we learn that “even every DINOSAUR was a baby once!”
Goodale’s spare text offers comfort and reassurance as it describes how the moon “remembers where you came from . . . even when you’ve forgotten.” Her artwork is fittingly suffused with the soft glow of moonlight, which appears especially luminous in spreads that depict a dark green forest filled with ferns and undergrowth. Against this moody, arboreal backdrop, pops of pink, purple, white and yellow wildflowers feel perfectly placed. And of course the moon is omnipresent, whether it’s gleaming in the sky or reflected in a stream.
The Moon Remembers pays quiet but powerful homage to families and the promise of new life. After all, the moon remembers “every life . . . every sweet moment. And the moon will remember you, perfect you, as you go and wherever you grow.”
Awake, Asleep
Awake, Asleep chronicles a day in the lives of three young children in clever rhymes, following three families in the same neighborhood from dawn until bedtime. We meet a single-parent family, a multigenerational family with same-sex parents and a family who will soon welcome a new baby as we enjoy the beauty of an ordinary day that’s filled with rhythms—including ups and downs—that all families share.
Author Kyle Lukoff won a 2022 Newbery Honor (along with a number of other awards) for his middle grade novel Too Bright to See. Here he employs far fewer words but with just as much impact, creating strings of short noun phrases to describe the ongoing action of the day. In an early spread, for instance, we read, “A yawn, a peep, a stretch, awake!” as we watch a cat, a child and their parent wake up and get out of bed. Later, Lukoff neatly summarizes a child’s evening meltdown over putting away a train set with “a take, a pry, a scream, a cry.” The book’s genius is that because the scenes and situations are so readily identifiable, readers need no additional explanation.
Nadia Alam’s illustrations present a series of curated moments depicting, for example, a father and child putting on their pink sneakers together in the morning, and later, another child helping an older relative who uses a cane stand up from a park bench. Alam showcases myriad emotions along with the love that pours over these children no matter their mood. Young readers will identify with all of these inquisitive, happy, grumpy and, finally, sleepy faces. The book concludes with a bedtime story (“A hold, a keep, a voice, a book.”), which makes Awake, Asleep feel like a loving review of the day gone by as well as a comforting way to prepare for all the many days to come.
It’s never too early to begin raising the next generation of readers. Whether you’re off to a baby shower or building a library for your own little bundle of joy, these four picture books are perfect choices.
Mary Beth Keane grew up around bars. “Most of my uncles owned bars or worked in them,” she says. Which is why, when the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, Keane found herself yearning for the indoor camaraderie of a really packed bar. But besides socializing with her husband and two sons, the best she could do was drive around Pearl River, New York—the town where she grew up and now lives—hoping to spot a friend to chat with from afar.
To compensate, Keane immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar at the novel’s center. The wonderfully unpretentious, gifted writer explains this by phone from Bozeman, Montana, where she’s researching her next novel. (Its Western setting will herald a marked change from her beloved 2019 novel, Ask Again, Yes, and The Half Moon, both of which are set in Gillam, a fictionalized version of Pearl River.)
In the novel, Malcolm Gephardt has worked at the Half Moon for years, and now he finally owns the place, with dreams to update and transform it. Unfortunately, creditors are at his heels, his marriage is on the rocks, and in the midst of a blizzard, a patron goes missing—setting the stage for plenty of riveting internal and external drama.
“This is a COVID book,” Keane says, “even though it doesn’t seem that way.” The pandemic is never mentioned, and there are no masks in sight. But Keane poured her loneliness and isolation right into Malcolm’s character, and the winter storm that paralyzes the town for a week or so accentuates the fact that a number of her characters feel trapped in their lives.
When asked about the impetus for The Half Moon, Keane explains that, at age 45, she’s starting to see couples get divorced and then, 18 months or so later, share Facebook posts showing “a whole new set of people and a new life,” she says. “I was thinking about to what degree we can change our lives once we reach a certain point. . . . I’m a very working-class child, and I grew up in a very Catholic community, and I don’t know whether it’s just me and the way I was raised, [but] I literally do not know how to do that.”
Not that she wants to, she adds quickly. “I’m very happy with my life. But part of being a writer is observing and watching other people, and I guess I just like thinking about things that I can’t imagine.” A friend of Keane’s recently commented that her books “are an argument for staying together, over and over,” which surprised the author. “Although it’s so obvious when I think about it now,” she says.
In The Half Moon, however, the odds of an intact marriage seem low. Malcolm’s wife, Jess, a lawyer, has been dreaming of having a child, but after years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, she has moved into the arms of someone else. Keane writes that Jess is weighed down by “Hormones. Grief. Boredom. The growing sense that life was passing her by and if she didn’t do something she’d leave nothing behind to prove she was even there.” Jess and Malcolm have had bitter disagreements over the financing of the bar, which she recognizes is his “baby,” his lifelong dream.
“Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”
In crafting Jess and Malcolm’s rocky marriage, Keane had no idea what would happen between the couple, and she reported to her editors that she had “tried every [outcome] you could possibly suggest,” including some wildly dramatic ones. Such is the “jigsaw” style of Keane’s creative process. “It seems like a piecemeal, haphazard way to write, but that’s the way I do it,” she says.
In a 2019 essay for the New York Times, she describes growing up without books and how her earliest literary influence as a kid in the late 1980s was the Reader’s Digest column “Drama in Real Life.” In a way, Keane says, her upbringing was freeing, especially when it came to choosing books at the library. “Boy, did I learn a lot from those Danielle Steel books,” she says, laughing. She wrote her first stories on the back of paper plates, then read them aloud to her mom. Her first clue that she might have a talent came after writing a fourth-grade essay about a baked potato. Later, at age 13, she wrote a short story for a school literary magazine about a girl whose sister had committed suicide; it was so convincing that her mother began getting condolences from friends who said they didn’t realize that she had an older child.
“I knew [early on] that it didn’t have to be true; it just had to be good,” Keane says. “So I always leaned toward fiction. I felt in my gut that I was better at writing than I was at other things.” As she grew older, her childhood reading habits allowed her to remain free from the burden experienced by many writers who try to measure up to certain literary reputations. “I really don’t care what everyone thinks is good or not. I just read for myself. And I think that is a gift that not every writer has.”
“As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”
While Keane was at Barnard College, novelist Mary Gordon told her, “You have a subject.” At the time, however, Keane had no clue what it was. “Suddenly,” she says, “I was with people who’d been all over the world, and they had read everything. They were writing about things like anorexia, bulimia, sex—things that just seemed beyond me. But what was interesting to me then, and I think still is, is work and what people do for a living.”
Keane is the daughter of two Irish immigrants; her mother had various jobs, and her father was a “sandhog,” a New York City tunnel worker. For Ask Again, Yes, Keane interviewed members of the New York Police Department to collect accurate details for her police officer characters, but with The Half Moon, she simply turned to family, gleaning insider bar knowledge about things like jukebox earnings, free swag from breweries, beverage distribution and state liquor licensing authorities. Her cousins tended to be more helpful than her uncles. “Irish people, they clam right up if they think you’re asking too many questions, especially since I’m a writer,” Keane says. With a laugh, she adds, “Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”
The novel’s fictional bar takes its name from the ship that English explorer Henry Hudson sailed on his 1609 voyage to discover a Northwest Passage; a variety of places and products in the Hudson Valley share the Half Moon name. The moniker is apt, since readers will wonder whether Malcolm and Jess’ marriage is waxing or waning. “I also like that the name isn’t overtly Irish,” Keane admits. “It sort of bothers me when everyone describes [my work] as ‘Irish people’ and ‘an Irish novel.’”
The hallmark of a classic Keane character isn’t their background or heritage, but rather their inability to articulate what’s bothering them. “I’m more familiar with and more sympathetic to people who would sooner either tamp it way down and pretend it’s not there—or throw a beer bottle against a wall,” she says. Malcolm, for instance, can charm customers with his gift of gab for hours, but at home, he’s not so much of a talker. In fact, one of his truest, most memorable forms of self-expression comes when he throws a cup of coffee at someone’s car. “These are my people, I guess,” Keane says. “As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”
Keane has spent a lifetime observing people in fiction and real life, and in both cases, she likes to keep things simple. “We’re just a disaster from beginning to end,” she says with a laugh. “Nobody gets any smarter. It’s just that kids look up to us. But I want to say all the time, ‘I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing, but I’m going to drag you along with me, and we’re going to do our best. You know, try to be kind to the people you love. And that’s about it.’”
Photo of Mary Beth Keane by Martin Hickey
When the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, author Mary Beth Keane (Ask Again, Yes) found herself yearning for the indoor camaraderie of a really packed bar. To compensate, she immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar at the story’s center.
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