★ Let’s Do Everything and Nothing

Illustrator Julia Kuo (The Sound of Silence, I Dream of Popo) makes her authorial debut with Let’s Do Everything and Nothing, a simple yet powerful salute to mothers and daughters and the time they spend together. With spare text and phenomenal illustrations, Kuo pays homage to epic scenes, intimate moments and everything in between. 

As the book opens, a mother and her young daughter stand atop a hill, tiny figures amid a gorgeous full-spread landscape depicted in rich shades of indigo. The girl’s bright red dress contrasts vividly, bringing the pair into sharp focus. “Will you climb a hill with me?” the text asks.

On subsequent pages, Kuo’s text offers invitations to “dive into a lake” and “read the starry sky.” Her illustrations transform them into grand adventures, and we see the pair diving among giant manta rays and reaching the summit of a snowy peak in mountaineering gear. Throughout, Kuo uses a spare color palette of deep blues and purples and highlights of reds, oranges and yellows. Her striking graphic style crisply illuminates these shared moments between mother and child. 

In closing scenes, the mother gives her daughter a bath, then the pair rest together and “watch the shadows stretch.” This exquisite book would be a perfect gift to bring to a baby shower. “We’ll do everything and nothing,” Kuo writes, “for being together is the best journey yet.”

Me and Ms. Too

A spunky girl has a bumpy transition after her father marries a children’s librarian in the fresh, funny Me and Ms. Too. 

“Before Ms. Too, my house looked like my house and nobody else’s,” young Molly announces. “My dad was my dad and nobody else’s.” Molly feels increasingly out of sorts as Ms. Too changes the living room wallpaper and fills their house with her belongings, including lots of books. 

Award-winning young adult author Laura Ruby (Bone Gap, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All) conveys Molly’s desire to resist this life change. She includes both Molly’s ongoing struggle (“Every time we went somewhere, I asked: ‘Is she coming too?’”) and scenes of her father’s courtship and wedding (“I said Ms. Too’s dress looked like underwear. I said my stomach hurt.”). Ruby’s narrative pacing is spot on as she captures how Molly slowly warms up to the new arrangement, and the trio eventually form a tightknit “funny kind of family” that Molly comes to adore. 

Exuberant, cartoon-style illustrations from Dung Ho (Eyes That Kiss in the Corners) energize this well-told tale. Molly’s exaggerated facial expressions, which shift gradually from obstinate and indignant to happy and loving, are particularly well done, while Dad and Ms. Too are fully realized in artful strokes by both Ho and Ruby. 

With warmth and honesty, Me and Ms. Too validates the emotional challenges of welcoming a new stepmother while shining a light on the wonderful outcome that can result. 

★ Also

E.B. Goodale’s Also is a lovely book about memory and intergenerational connections, told with accessible sophistication. 

The book’s unnamed narrator begins by describing a visit to her grandmother’s house on a beautiful summer day. She spends the afternoon among the blueberry bushes on a hill behind the house and is eventually joined by her mother, her grandmother and her grandmother’s orange cat, Nutmeg. As the narrator introduces herself and each character (including Nutmeg), she describes what they are doing that day, then describes a memory that each is recalling at that very moment. For instance, the narrator’s mother remembers sitting in the kitchen when she was a child, sorting blueberries and laughing with her sister. 

Goodale (Windows, The House of Grass and Sky) paints these remembered scenes using blueberry ink, which results in a purplish duotone effect and visually distinguishes the characters’ memories from the vivid greens, yellows and oranges of the present-day setting. An easy recipe for blueberry ink, included on the final page, is an excellent resource for readers inspired to paint their own memories. 

A bright red cardinal (a bird commonly associated with departed souls) appears on every page, and its lively spirit helps peel back the book’s many layers of memory. Toward the end of the book, the cardinal swoops and glides across blueberry-ink spreads, trailing the bright colors of the present in its wake and uniting past, present and future along the path of its flight. 

Also is sure to prompt conversations about meaningful memories between adult readers and young listeners, while its subtext—that people and places we love are always with us in our hearts—offers quiet comfort to children experiencing loss. Also is a colorful portrait of three generations of mothers and daughters and the bonds they share.

Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle

In Nina LaCour (We Are Okay, Watch Over Me) and Kaylani Juanita’s Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle, a young girl in California spends a week at home with her Mama while Mommy is away on a business trip to Minnesota.

LaCour’s day-by-day account spotlights fun times (projecting a movie on the wall of a garden shed) as well as lows (when Mama is “too busy to play”). A midweek video call cheers everyone up and gives Mommy the opportunity to share that she’s missing Mama and her daughter as much as they miss her. “I miss you as much as all the snow in Minnesota.” she tells them. In a touching scene at the girl’s school, the teacher asks if anyone else in the class is missing someone. Several students are, including a boy whose father “is in a faraway country” and a girl whose older sister is away at college. 

Juanita’s illustrations are packed with small details that will entice and hold young readers’ attention, from the plants that fill the family’s living room to the cakes and pastries in the window of the café, where an apron-clad employee sets out food for neighborhood cats while Mama laughs at her daughter’s milk mustache. 

Juanita perfectly captures the girl’s mutable emotions over the seven days that Mommy is away. At lunch on Wednesday, the girl slumps over the table next to Mommy’s empty chair. On Sunday, as Mommy’s trip nears its end, she frolics through a community garden and eagerly gathers a welcome-home bouquet. 

Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle is a reassuring and inclusive look at what it feels like to be separated from and reunited with a parent.

★ The Garden We Share

Zoë Tucker and Julianna Swaney’s The Garden We Share is superb and subtle, full of beautiful writing and illustrations that perfectly convey its deep themes. Initially, it appears to be a simple story about community gardening, but soon reveals itself to be much more.

One early spring day, a girl and an older woman—perhaps her grandmother—join two other women and a watchful cat to plant seeds in a garden nestled between apartment buildings. “We scatter them on the ground like stars in the sky,” the young narrator says, “and quickly cover them with a blanket of sweet soil.”

As expected, the weather warms, and the seeds sprout. Swaney, who also illustrated HGTV star Joanna Gaines’ We Are the Gardeners, deploys her signature palette of muted pastels to depict the garden’s gradual blossoming. In one spread, warm-toned flowers cover the entire right-hand page and spill over onto the left-hand page, where the narrator and her older friend sunbathe side by side on a blanket, and the other two women read and snooze on nearby lounge chairs. It’s a marvelous vision of summertime bliss. Soon, as vegetables ripen and everyone gathers at a picnic table to share the bountiful harvest, The Garden We Share becomes a meditation on the changing seasons.

But wait—there’s more. On the page opposite the harvest feast, we see the narrator’s older friend is bed bound, though still vibrant as the pair collect and preserve seeds from their garden. In the next spread, deep winter has set in and the narrator visits the garden without her friend. “Petals fall, and colors fade—and you are gone,” she says. Observant readers may have noticed previous clues to the woman’s declining health, though early indications are easy to miss on a first read: In summer, she starts using a cane, and she appears in a headscarf at the feast.

Words and pictures work together seamlessly to connect the ending of the older woman’s life to the natural progressions of the world, such as the passing of the seasons. It’s handled with such sensitivity that younger readers will be able to take in exactly as much of this message as they are ready for. While many children’s books address the loss of a grandparent, the fact that the narrator’s relationship to her older friend is never specified allows for more points of identification, enabling The Garden We Share to guide young readers through a wider range of losses.

The next spring, the narrator returns to the garden to plant the seeds she and her friend collected the previous year. “And as the morning air warms my heart, little shoots emerge like magic,” the narrator says, “And you are with me again.” The Garden We Share is a gentle book overflowing with big lessons about life and death, the importance of experiences shared and the multitude of ways that the earth sustains us, even through great loss.

All From a Walnut

Ammi-Joan Paquette and Felicita Sala’s All From a Walnut explores themes similar to those in The Garden We Share, but sounds different notes along the way.

Emilia wakes up one morning to find a walnut on her bedside table. “It must be walnut season,” her mother observes. Then Grandpa, who lives with them, relates the story of how he immigrated to America from Italy when he was a boy (“a little nut like you”). One of the only belongings he brought was a walnut he had plucked from a tree outside his window. He planted it and tended to its growth, and now a mighty walnut tree grows in Emilia’s yard. When Emilia’s mother was a girl, she planted her own tree next to her father’s, and now it’s Emila’s turn.

As Grandpa tells his story, Sala’s art brings it to life, using sepia tones to differentiate these remembered scenes from the present day and enlivening the old country through the textures of rock walls, stone buildings and leafy vegetation. She expresses the enormity of Grandpa’s journey and his family’s challenges, depicting a huge ship docked in America as a long line of passengers emerge. Sala’s paintings of Grandpa’s walnut trees are majestic and convey the wonder of this gift from nature—and straight from Grandpa’s heart.

All From a Walnut is a story of heritage, generations past and future, and the gifts we each pass on. As Grandpa shows Emilia how to plant her walnut and care for it, he moves “slowly, like he was running out of batteries.” Text and pictures quietly relay both the plant’s growth and Grandpa’s slow but steady decline. “All the best things grow with time. Even when you can’t see them, still they grow,” he tells Emilia in their final scene together.

In the seasons and years that follow, Emilia’s tree comforts her and reminds her of her grandfather, and she looks forward to continuing his tradition with her own child. All From a Walnut beautifully depicts life’s cycles and highlights not only the sadness of saying goodbye but also the wonder of new beginnings.

Emile and the Field

In his first book for children, Kevin Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker and the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, explores what it means to quietly enjoy and commune with nature. Young begins Emile and the Field with gentle simplicity. “There was a boy named Emile who fell in love with a field,” he writes, and we see Emile and his little black dog frolicking in a vast meadow full of wildflowers.

Chioma Ebinama’s evocative illustrations transport readers right to the meadow. Soft-toned, impressionistic flowers completely envelop Emile, offering soothing beauty and opportunities for contemplation and exploration. Not a lot happens, and that’s the point: “The bumblebees would sing to him—never sting—their worlds were honey, and led him to wander.” Spot illustrations and full-page spreads give readers close-up views as well as wide-angled, telescopic glimpses at Emile’s musings and meanderings. When autumn comes, Emile plays in the leaves, observing that “his favorite maple is as tall as his mother.”

Emile is a solitary soul and a big thinker who considers the field his best friend and sounding board. Once winter arrives, however, he feels as though his friend has disappeared, and he doesn’t like having to share his space with “other, loud kids” who sled there. Emile’s father provides a helpful perspective that changes Emile’s outlook and restores his well-being.

Emile and the Field is a love letter to nature that highlights the importance of having a special place to relax, roam and just be yourself as you wonder about your place in this wide world.