Adèle and Simon hit the road again! They previously explored America and Paris, but they are now headed to China to visit their photographer uncle, Sidney. This is the China of more than a century ago, allowing today’s children a trip of their own.

First stop is Hong Kong, where Sidney takes the two youngsters on a shopping spree. Simon gets a hat, a jacket, a knapsack, a flute and many other items while Adèle opts for one large gift: a camera so she can record her journey just like her uncle. Readers familiar with this series knows what is to come: Adèle will write postcards home to “Dear Mama” and Simon will lose an object at each stop. At the Shanghai silk farm, he loses the yellow scarf. Careful readers will pore over each detailed, colorful pen-and-ink illustration to find the missing object. Older eyes will undoubtedly have to search longer and harder than young eyes, but no matter the age of the searcher, it’s great fun to finally locate the missing item. (This time the scarf is in the mouth of a dog.) On each page, the search is made more challenging by the artist’s color choices; the missing yellow scarf is exactly the color that most of the people are wearing in this spread. Searching for the red abacus on the following scene means discerning it from the many sticks of candied apples that are the same red. Thankfully, McClintock provides a dandy picture of the items in Adèle’s early letter to Mama, and readers can flip back and forth to help remember what the objects look like. When Adèle develops her photos after the trip, she sees a record of each missing item.

McClintock also includes tiny thumbprint pictures with fascinating factual information of each spread in the backmatter, further adding to the fun for older readers and adults. Many children learn Chinese at school these days, and it’s easy to see teachers using this picture book in class, even with much older students. The historical information, maps and thumbnail guide to this enormous country will certainly fascinate any child with an interest in China. While comparisons to Where’s Waldo? are inevitable, Adelé and Simon’s journeys are much more interesting, encouraging readers of all ages time to slow down and read the detailed pictures. Repeated visits will reveal more and more details—eye candy at its very best! 

Resisting bedtime is a rite of childhood; we are all experts at delay tactics, procrastination methods and just-one-more-drink-of-water tales. Into the world of bedtime books comes It Is Not Time for Sleeping by Lisa Graff, illustrated by Lauren Castillo. Offering an alternative to exhausted parents and stalling, Graff and Castillo help children ease into bedtime with routine and rhyme.

Most adults use the evening to transition into bed: We have things to check off our lists before our minds can rest; it’s the same for kids. It may be nearing time for bed, the yawns may be enormous, but bedtime doesn’t come until after baths are completed, teeth are brushed, favorite pajamas put on, stories are read. Even then, there is one final thing that is the most important of all.

Graff is clearly an expert on children, providing details that would feel extremely important to little ones. Perfect as a final bedtime story, Graff’s calm repetition of the completed tasks helps kids slow down and relax, putting their energetic minds at ease.

Castillo’s illustrations are bright and boldly colored, echoing a world of crayons and toys. The playful nature and silliness will initially engage little readers, and sleepy little ones will be reassured by its familiarity, With our narrator at last in bed, the colors and lights dim as the story nears the end.

If it’s nearing time for bed—but not quite—It Is Not Time for Sleeping might be just what your bedtime routine needs. Just don’t forget the goodnight kiss. 

As the city first wakes, the sky is still dark, the moon still glimmers and quiet still lingers. In Good Morning, City, author Pat Kiernan shows readers the hustle and bustle that quickly take over the city, even in the early hours before dawn. As a morning news anchor for New York’s cable news channel NY1, Kiernan is an authority on waking and observing the city before first light.

Beginning with bakers preparing fresh bread, the story continues with other important activities that start the day and the people who perform them. From the ferryboat captain and construction worker to the police officer directing commuting drivers and waitress taking hungry diners’ orders, the homes, streets and businesses progressively become more active.

Descriptions of a city wouldn’t be complete without its varied sounds, so Kiernan includes the tooting of ferryboats and the smashing of garbage trucks. Pascal Campion’s digitally enhanced artwork captures the sights of the city. The blues and purples of pre-dawn give way to mauves and pinks and then yellows and oranges as the sun rises and shines.

Also waking as sunshine floods her room is a little girl and her baby brother. More sights, sounds and even smells fill the morning as her dad makes breakfast. In a fitting conclusion, the girl’s family sits down to eat as an anchorman reads the news. After reading this story, children can’t help but notice how their own city awakes.

Gary is a racing pigeon, but for reasons unknown, he cannot fly. He dreams of adventure, just like the other racing pigeons, and he even keeps a scrapbook filled with travel mementos. He’s fond of listening to his friends, all clad in bright red racing uniforms, discuss “wind directions and flight paths” at dinner, and it is in this way that he is able to build the scrapbook.

One evening, Gary falls into a travel basket and is taken via a vehicle far into the city. He sees his friends race through the sky and then disappear. After he assumes he is stuck in the city forever, he remembers his scrapbook and uses what’s inside to successfully plot his way home.

Author-illustrator Leila Rudge, originally from England and now living in Australia, renders the story delicately in full-bleed, earth-toned spreads with consistent pastel blues on nearly every spread. The one where Gary imagines his route back home looks, fittingly, like a scrapbook page—with a stamp, bus ticket, train ticket, map and more. Rudge’s endpapers have the same mementos, inviting readers into Gary’s journey.

Ultimately, the other pigeons long to replicate the nature of Gary’s own adventure, and readers see that they’ve hopped on some mass transit at the story’s close to take a trip into the city. Passengers seem pleased to be sharing their space with the birds. Gary may be different—readers don’t know why he can’t fly (perhaps it’s a physical handicap or even an emotionally traumatic one)—but that doesn’t stop him from mastering his fears and having a grand adventure of his own. That he inspires his friends in the process is icing on the cake. After all, it was their memories he relied upon to create his vivid new ones.

This story passes with flying colors—a charmer through and through.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

In the closing note of this contemplative picture book from the talented Newbery Honor-winning poet Joyce Sidman, the author notes that she constructed the text of the book in the form of an invocation, a “poem that invites something to happen, often asking for help or support.” She notes that humans have been putting invocations to use for a long time, and she prompts readers with a series of questions: Do they work? Can they comfort us? “What is it you wish for?”

What comes before is a spare, evocative poem, one in which an unnamed speaker asks for the sky to “fill with flurry and flight.” The speaker is asking for snow, and in the next few lines of her poem, Sidman brings the fluffy white stuff to life with fresh and vivid metaphors. The speaker longs for a kind of paralysis of the day—a slow but happy and white day of not having to go out and engage in the usual routines, a day that is changed and renewed by the weather, a day that cancels plans.

Caldecott Medalist Beth Krommes takes Sidman’s words and seamlessly extends them into the story of a young girl, whose mother is a pilot. Is this the girl’s wish? The father’s? Maybe even the mother’s? No matter, because either way the wish is granted: When the snowstorm prevents the girl’s mother from doing her day’s work, she heads home, back to her husband and daughter with some hugs, hot cocoa and pastries to boot. Many spreads, including the first two and final one, are wordless. Krommes’ scratchboard and watercolor illustrations are highly textured and patterned, and just as in the natural world, no two snowflakes are the same. Her spreads are busy but never overwhelming to the eye, and what she does with light and shadow in many of these evening scenes is spellbinding.

It’s a sweet, but never saccharine, tale of family—and so cozy in every possible way that readers will want to return to it again and again. Pair it with your best hot cocoa recipe. Read. Repeat. 

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

In her ambitious new picture book, Carson Ellis brings readers a story of optimism and renewal, featuring an invented language. They are words used by a world of talking insects to communicate their wonder over and admiration for a vibrant flower that appears where they make their home.

“Du is tak?” one damselfly asks another on the book’s first spread, as the two stare at a fledgling green shoot popping from the earth. “Ma nazoot” is the reply. Meanwhile, a hairy caterpillar hanging from a nearby branch waves goodbye to readers with a hearty “Ta ta!” and a big grin. The insects gather, gazing in fascination at the growing plant, and they eventually knock on the door of Icky, an elderly, bowler hat-wearing pill bug who watches as the insects, including some eager beetles, build a fort on the plant. Tragedy turns to triumph when a spider who has built a web on the plant is destroyed by a bird. Soon after the bugs rebuild their “furt,” a beautiful flower blossoms.

But since all living things must come to their end, the flower dies at the onset of winter. “Ta ta, furt.” On the next spread, readers are treated to a glorious nighttime scene, the plant withered and drooping, while a winged insect plays a dirge on his fiddle. The serenade takes place atop the cocoon—remember our retiring caterpillar?—only to reveal a soaring, triumphant moth on the next spread. Because life, after all, sometimes defies the odds and springs forth from destruction.

Ellis’ precise and detailed illustrations of bespectacled bugs and an elaborate fort utterly beguile. She never switches up her perspective, bringing readers the same location with her insects entering and exiting as if on stage. The colors are rich, and the inventive text is captivating, begging to be read repeatedly. It would be easy to make such a story clever for the sake of being clever, but instead Ellis has created one of the smartest, most original and most endearing picture books of this year.

Du iz tak? It’s a keeper is what it is. 

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

There’s a bit of the Wild West spirit in all of us, even those of us who have never ridden a horse or slept by a campfire. Lingering in our blood, it’s a connection to the land, a compassion for the animals and people around us, a longing for wide skies and faraway stars. Written by Kate Hoefler and illustrated by Jonathan Bean, Real Cowboys strikingly echoes that spirit.

For many of us, cowboys are a thing of legends and old black-and-white movies; many little ones have never heard of a cattle drive. Real Cowboys is an ode to these men and women, a look back at an era very much gone, and also a cowboy primer for young readers. Simply and genuinely told, Real Cowboys covers all aspects of a cowboy’s tough life: lost cattle and fast dogs, blowing dust and prickly cactus plants, coyote songs and watchful nights.

Much like an unassuming, weatherworn cowboy telling a story, Hoefler unfolds the life of cowboys and cowgirls with simple, calm language. In some cases, her words are poetic and precise, and in others she lets the art speak and the imagination soar.

With art that is in turns colorful and muted, tumultuous and peaceful, artist Jonathan Bean perfectly captures the mood and the whims of the West. Bean masterfully captures not only dust storms and cattle drives, but also the moments of persistent, careful watching and lonely cowboy dreams. Vague, almost abstract, color-blocked shapes interlock, silhouettes pass through the background, making every spread a true Southwesterly work of art.

The perfect gift for the young and old cowboys in your life, Real Cowboys will have you heading west, even if only in your heart.

You’ve gotta hand it to Mo Willems for knowing how to bring his readers the unexpected. Although he’s arguably best known for his Pigeon books and Elephant and Piggie series, Willems departs from those familiar characters for a charming new story about frogs and baguettes, of all things.

This is the story of Nanette, a frog who is sent on an errand to retrieve a baguette from the bakery, complete with a narrator who speaks directly to her. She finds the baguette so warm and wonderful that she doesn’t succeed in bringing it home. Instead, she devours it on the way and is left guilt-ridden. The story is in rhyme, but those who fear stale, singsong couplets need not worry. Willems rhymes the “ette” sound all throughout (Nanette, baguette, fret, upset) in a pleasing way. His meter is spot-on, and never once does he force words in the name of rhyming. (He even manages to make clarinet fit seamlessly.)

The humor here is deliciously over-the-top; cue the delighted laughs of children as they watch Nanette devour the bread, knowing full well she shouldn’t. Willems renders the illustrations of the crime itself with lots of drama—loud, comic-style cartoons, replete with jagged, sharp lines, as well as onomatopoeia. (“KRACK!” goes the baguette as she chomps on it.) But there are also laugh-out-loud moments of dry humor, including the one where he manages to rhyme “Tibet.” (Nanette figures she’ll be in so much trouble that she should perhaps leave the country.) And the fact that Nanette loves bread and not Mr. Barnett’s pet fly is a moment of absurdity that could only come from the likes of Mo.

Willems created a cardboard community for Nanette’s setting—evidently, toilet paper rolls were the name of the game—which he then photographed. The title page spread shows Nanette’s neighborhood in all its paper glory. The story wraps up with a twist, one that eases Nanette’s shame.

Breaking bread with a frog (words I never expected to string together) is wildly funny when it comes from Mo. 

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.