Wishes begins as a mother and her three children pack in the middle of the night. They say a tearful goodbye to the family members who will remain behind, then wait in a long line to board a small boat for a perilous journey across the ocean. They survive crowded conditions, hard winds and rain, the turbulent sea and the searing sun, all in the hope of a new life.

Author Mượn Thị Văn structures this tale as a poetic series of wishes made by one of the children. As the girl watches her family pack food into a yellow knapsack, she imagines that “the bag wished it was deeper.” As a storm tosses the tiny boat, “the sea wished it was calmer.” The child herself holds dear a poignant and heart-rending wish: “And I wished . . . I didn’t have to wish . . . anymore.” This wish is revealed over the course of four spreads set against a brightening sky as a large vessel spots their boat, welcomes its passengers aboard and takes them to the shoreline of a grand, gleaming city.

Victo Ngai’s illustrations do much of the heavy lifting here, extending Văn’s spare, lyrical text in concrete, cinematic ways. Ngai doesn’t hold back, never once shying away from the journey’s traumatic elements. Sorrow, fear, distress, life-threatening danger: It’s all here. One spread, drenched in washes of red, puts readers right on the boat as people cling to one another, the narrator embracing her family with tears in her eyes. “The heart wished it was stronger,” Văn writes.

A closing note reveals that this powerful story is personal for Văn. As a child, she left her grandfather behind and traveled with the rest of her family from southern Vietnam to a refugee camp in Hong Kong, eventually settling in the United States.

This rich and nuanced tale illuminates the closely held wishes of refugees the world over. It’s unforgettable.

The Night Walk opens with a mother’s tantalizing invitation to her two children: “Wake up. . . . Let’s go, so we get there on time.” It’s the middle of the night, but the sleepy children get ready for an adventurous journey to an unknown destination. Perfectly paced page turns capture the family’s trek and the wonders that await in the world after nightfall. Therein lies the joy of this picture book: Both the journey and the destination are delightful.

One of the children narrates as the family walks with all senses on alert. They hear crickets chirping and a train “slicing through the darkness.” The narrator notices not just the train’s “shrieking” wheels but also the “still silence” that follows its departure. They smell honeysuckle on the air, feel the lingering warmth of the pavement and notice glowing lights inside buildings. The big hotel gleams “bright like a chandelier,” while the last house in their village has “one eye open,” an upstairs window aglow.

When they leave their village behind to enter a “whispering forest,” Dorléans’ mastery of language (with superb work from translator Polly Lawson) is especially apparent. Her sensory details are remarkable and vivid. “The earth was damp,” she writes, and “the bark smelled comforting.” A palette of dusky, spectral blues envelops the family on their journey, interrupted only by pops of pale yellow from bedside lamps, porch lights, flashlights, the train’s headlights and the moon. When they finally reach the summit of a mountainous slope, the expansive vista and the revelation of their ultimate objective is breathtaking.

Never hurried, this eloquent story is a beautifully measured tale not unlike one giant inhale (the journey) followed by a long, happy exhale (the closing spreads). Pick up a copy and make a night of it.

There’s hardly a more intriguing or renowned family of creatives than the Wyeths. Patriarch N.C. Wyeth was a painter and illustrator who, with his wife, raised five talented children in their famed home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Henriette, Carolyn and Andrew all followed in their father’s artistic footsteps, while Ann became a composer and Nathaniel an engineer and inventor.

Writer Beth Kephart invites readers into the Wyeth family’s busy life, depicting an imaginary day narrated by young Henriette. With paint box, easel and canvas in hand, Henriette eagerly follows her father on a ramble through the countryside to paint the sprawling landscape. Along the way, they pass the other Wyeth children, each busy in their own little world, and Henriette ponders Pa’s advice to “awaken into your dreams.” When Henriette and Pa reach an open meadow, they set up their easels and, in a wonderful spread, begin to paint side by side.

And I Paint It: Henriette Wyeth’s World is a sensitive, satisfying portrayal of an adoring daughter spending time with her father. It’s also an inspiring glimpse into the careful cultivation and blossoming of a child’s creative spirit. Kephart’s writing is full of marvelously specific detail, from “the slosh of the creek” to “the green growing into the cap of a strawberry” to Pa’s coat, which “smells like apple cores and packing moss and turpentine.”

The text echoes with an unspoken sense of the past that’s reinforced by Amy June Bates’ mixed media illustrations. Her muted palette of pastels lends a dreamy mood to the spreads and recalls the spirit of the Wyeths’ worlds. She nimbly alternates between broad landscapes and close-ups of singular items (acorns, a bouquet of flowers) that echo how N.C. and Henriette observe and paint subjects both big and small. Her illustrations also incorporate small pencil sketches—a leaping squirrel, birds in flight—that highlight another stage of the artistic process.

Though the narrative is enriched by biographical information included in the backmatter, this beautiful picture book stands well on its own for readers unfamiliar with the Wyeth family and provides a fascinating look at one of its often overlooked members.

Victoria Peckham, Annie Yolkley, Rosie Van der Beak, Pearl S. Cluck: All of these delightful monikers have two things in common. They are all, of course, pun-derful plays on chicken-ness, but they are also all past winners of the Golden Feather Award for Chickentown’s Best Hen of the Year.

That’s a very big deal in Chickentown, a fabulously feather-strewn village created by Spanish author-illustrator Albert Arrayás as the backdrop for his fantastical and funny The Chickentown Mystery. Rather than being relegated to backyard coops, Chickentown’s hens live with people in their houses. They play checkers, take luxurious bubble baths and sleep snugly in their beds. Nigella “Minnie” Cooper even appears to drive her very own car.

Arrayás captures Chickentown and its denizens in delicate pencil and watercolor illustrations filled with pinks and oranges that convey a sense of warmth and whimsy. Indigo blues introduce an air of mystery when—what the cluck?—hens start to go missing mere days before this year’s Golden Feather competition. Will Mayor Cockscomb’s search parties locate the missing chickens? Or will local witch Miss Henrietta and her hen, Lucinda, need to assist?

Arrayás sprinkles clues throughout, transforming tastefully decorated bedrooms into crime scenes for budding forensic investigators. Once the gasp-inducing finale reveals the perpetrator and readers recover from their upended expectations, they’ll rush right back to the beginning to scrutinize the book’s pages anew.

While Arrayás’ themes are clear—doing the right thing is rewarded, and we shouldn’t believe everything we see—he leaves plenty of room for imagination as well. His art offers tantalizing hints about the enigmatic chickens’ inner lives, and his story is a thought-provoking blend of mystery, comedy and magic that will have readers looking at their feathered friends with heightened appreciation and a healthy dose of speculation.

A girl and her abuela find an injured bird, bring it home and nurse it back to health in this unassuming tale. Inspired by one of Blanca Gómez’s own childhood experiences, Bird House is quietly delightful as it depicts an act of true kindness.

The girl narrates with gentle pacing from the moment the pair first notices the sunny yellow bird on a snowy day. After Abuela mends the bird’s wounded leg, they release it from its cage and allow it to fly around the living room. Their pet cat seems especially curious about the new guest. When the bird has fully recovered, they set it free, but it returns after the snow melts and spring arrives. “Abuela, can we keep it?” the girl asks. “No, darling, the bird doesn’t belong to us,” Abuela tells her.

Gómez reduces the story to its essentials, both verbally and visually. There are no feats of linguistic acrobatics; the text is plain-spoken and conveyed in short sentences: “It was fantastic,” we read as the girl watches the bird fly around the living room. Yet a sweet but never cloying tenderness pervades the story. The girl treasures the time she spends with her grandmother, observing that “everything was always fantastic at Abuela’s house.”

In spacious, uncluttered spreads, Gomez’s textured paper-collage illustrations contrast muted colors, such as Abuela’s charcoal gray cardigan and the powder blue of her tiled bathroom wall, against bright reds and yellows found in the furniture and living room floor. As spring arrives, gloomy winter makes way for the vivid greens of the plants on Abuela’s back porch. This is a story that breathes, and its artwork exudes a simple, timeless charm.

Some books offer a chance to escape, while others provide space for contemplation and reflection. It’s the rare book that does both. Bursting with insight, Shawn Harris’ Have You Ever Seen a Flower? transforms a trip to the mountains into a spirited voyage into our very consciousness.

The book begins with a tiny, colorful child, the only pop of brightness amid an intricate graphite city. Buildings tower around her, looming and glum. When the girl gets in a car and travels down a dark road away from the city, gray buildings give way to white emptiness before the book explodes with color. The vibrant hues that once gilded only the girl now surround her, with fields of warm-toned flowers and triangular mountains filled with all the shades of the rainbow. The illustrations grow and bloom surrealistically, as outstretched arms become the leaves of flowers, reaching toward the sun, and a drop of blood from a pricked finger becomes a meadow of crimson blossoms. 

All the while, Harris addresses readers directly in a series of wide-eyed observations and imaginative questions. “Have you ever seen a flower using nothing but your nose? Breathe deep . . . what do you see?” His language is playful and sprinkled with subtle moments of alliteration and assonance. 

Composed of sweeping colored pencil strokes, Harris’ art has a simplicity that belies its expert use of negative space and perspective. The illustrations don’t just carry the book’s narrative; they also deliver a beautiful metaphor as Have You Ever Seen a Flower? builds to an astonishing, all-encompassing declaration of connectedness: We are all flowers.

Have You Ever Seen a Flower? is an invitation to pause and take a moment to feel, imagine and experience the worlds around us and inside us. Its joy, color and hopefulness will ignite the imagination of anyone lucky enough to experience its magic.

Author Andrea Wang’s childhood memory of picking watercress by the side of the road serves as the inspiration for this emotional powerhouse of a picture book, which she describes in an author’s note as “both an apology and a love letter” to her parents. 

Riding with her family in an old Pontiac, a Chinese American girl describes the embarrassing moment when her parents stop the car to enthusiastically pick bunches of watercress growing in a ditch near the road. Dinner that night includes the watercress, served with garlic, but the girl refuses to eat. When her mother reminds her the meal is free, the girl withdraws further: “Free is hand-me-down clothes and roadside trash-heap furniture and now, dinner from a ditch.” 

Her mother responds by leaving the table to find a childhood photo and sharing, for the first time, the story of her own brother, who died as a boy during a famine in China. After hearing this story, the girl feels remorse for being ashamed of her family, a moment that Wang captures with care and subtlety. 

Wang’s writing is tender and detailed, describing the watercress as “delicate and slightly bitter, like Mom’s memories of home.” With raw honesty, the book’s first-person narration allows readers to see through the girl’s eyes. We experience both the sting of her shame and her newfound understanding alongside her. 

Caldecott Honor illustrator Jason Chin’s soft, expressive watercolors lean on sepia tones, an appropriate choice for a tale that serves as a recollection of memory. Along with depicting the self-conscious girl with a photorealistic eloquence, Chin incorporates occasional images of the mother’s memories of her life in China. The spread in which she shares her memories of the famine is especially haunting. On one page, the mother describes how they ate anything they could find, and her family listens from the dinner table with expressions of sadness; on the opposite page, her brother’s chair at the table is empty. 

Watercress is a delicate and deeply felt exploration of memory, trauma and family.