Sunday has been feeling overworked and underappreciated, so she walks off the job, leaving the remaining days of the week wondering how they’ll fill her shoes. The auditions to find her replacement quickly descend into hilarious chaos as the proposed successors grow more far-fetched; even “UnicornsWithFlashlightsForHornsDay” gets an audience. Monday through Saturday are run ragged from evaluating potential days full of sweets, dogs, hats and superheroes, while in the background, a group of frustrated cats continues their campaign for “Caturday.” How will the days of the week ever find the perfect seventh day?

Bestselling author Brad Meltzer’s eclectic text is peppered with clever asides and loads of playful language as it bounces between narrative and dialogue, delivered energetically via speech bubbles. Pop culture and historical references run the gamut from Shark Week to Elbridge Gerry (James Madison’s vice president, for whom the practice of gerrymandering is named), sure to earn a laugh from readers of every age.

Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat (The Adventures of Beekle) illustrates A New Day with all the energy and bustle of a zany animated movie. Cheerful and colorful, every page is eye-catching, entertaining and full of enticing details. Saturday rocks a beige cardigan that recalls Jeff Bridges’ iconic Big Lebowski character, but its pattern is formed by knitted letter z’s. Children gobble boxes labelled “CAN-D” and “SHOOGR.” The anthropomorphized days are instantly recognizable characters with the appearances and personalities we’d expect from them. Monday has a tie and holds a clipboard; Thursday has a laid-back, almost-end-of-the-week smirk; and Friday wears a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and flip-flops.

While A New Day begins like a rough day at the office and unwinds like a sugar-high explosion, it never loses its sense of purpose and teamwork. An enormously fun read with a heaping side of silliness, A New Day doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s an earnest reminder that, with a little creativity and thoughtfulness, we can make each day a day worth celebrating.

Freckle-faced Frankie McGee loves tractors, but his obsession finally tips his mother over the edge, sending her into a humorous meltdown at the public library in All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors. Kids will get a kick out of this hilarious role reversal, especially when Mom is shown perched upside down in a chair, with her head on the floor and feet in the air. As Mom pleads with Frankie to branch out with his reading choices, he mounts an entertaining defense in rhyming prose that’s guaranteed to grab the attention of young vehicular enthusiasts.

His arguments unfold in a series of full-page spreads in which Davina Bell’s text and Jenny Lovlie’s art fall together like seeds in a newly planted field, brimming with possibility. Tractors fill a cascade of countryside scenes that show male and female drivers busy with different tasks that readers will enjoy identifying. Lovlie’s art strikes a perfect balance between healthy doses of technical detail (for instance, comparing Massey Fergusons with John Deeres) and a cornucopia of kid-friendly curves and colors.

Mom’s urgent protests are comical; with a talk-to-the-hand gesture, she turns away from her son’s lecture. Their good-natured give-and-take ramps up the tension delightfully. When Mom reminds Frankie that he used to like trains, he quips, “How boring—I’m snoring just thinking of that.” Meanwhile, readers will be energized by every colorful page, whether it’s a town scene that shows the path Frankie and Mom take to the library or a spread brimming with all sorts of things that go, including a hot air balloon, a tugboat and a cement mixer. 

At its heart, All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors is a rollicking love letter not just to tractors but also to libraries, where books are waiting for people with many different interests. The kind librarian, Miss Squid, tells Frankie’s mom to “Hush!” while reassuring Frankie, “Well you know yourself best. / When you want something different, just come and find me. / A kid who likes books is a nice thing to see.” 

My First Day is a captivating story that depicts one child’s journey to school.

“Today is the first day.” A young Vietnamese boy, his backpack resting snugly on his shoulders, heads out. Mama told him he’s finally big enough to do this alone. Paddling where “the great river, mother Mekong, tumbles into the endless sea,” the boy cuts a striking figure as he stands resolutely in his boat while tall, foam-crested waves in rich shades of green and cyan swell around him.

The book’s language is both plain-spoken (“I set out upon the waves and begin my adventure”) and evocative (“I paddle out into the floodwaters, past yesterdays and all the things I didn’t know”). Author-illustrators Phùng Nguyên Quang and Huỳnh Kim Liên draw seamless parallels between the boy’s travels and the first day of school that awaits him: “There is still a world to learn,” he says as he first leaves home. Later, he likens his journey to the “unfamiliar hallways of the forest” and refers to the “blackboard” of the river.

With resilience, the boy endures rough waters, rain, crocodiles and pythons—some real, some imaginary. These darker spreads, filled with menacing, beguiling shadows, eventually make way for exquisite, light-filled pages. Coral-hued rays of sunlight break through clouds, and the sky fills with brilliant colors and “a dance of storks and new worlds.” In one thrilling spread, Quang and Liên provide an underwater perspective: The boy floats on the surface as we look up at him alongside schools of fish who move gracefully through the water.

Fluid, energetic lines, compelling page turns and a forward momentum as the boy steadfastly paddles through the water make My First Day a particularly propulsive, cinematic story. Readers everywhere who know the thrill of the first day of school will delight to see other children arriving in their respective boats at the book’s close, though they may be sad to see the boy’s adventure end. The book’s back matter includes a note reminding readers that children go to school in many different ways and that some children are “even heroes on their journeys!

While some books light paths with their words, other books don’t need words to shine. Gideon Sterer and and Mariachiara Di Giorgio’s The Midnight Fair may be a wordless picture book, but its story is clear, compelling and utterly enchanting.

When trucks and trailers arrive at an open field, forest animals watch their home transform into a lively carnival, complete with roller coasters, games and throngs of people. But when the crowds leave for the night, the carnival truly comes to life. Raccoons and bears ride the roller coaster, their arms in the air as it rockets down the track. A deer exchanges a sprig of berries for French fries at the concession stand. A fox plays the ring-toss game (run by a deer) and wins a goldfish in a plastic bag for a prize. The animals crash bumper cars and wave to one another as they whirl by on the carousel.

Through clever use of framing and perspective, Sterer and Di Giorgio invite readers to be a part of each moment. We watch from above as furry friends spin in teacups below. We’re behind the counter as an earnest baby bear pushes his acorns toward us to buy a tantalizing pink and white ice cream cone. When dawn arrives, the animals vanish into the forest; the entire evening might have been a dream if not for the nuts and twigs bursting from every cash bucket as the watchman makes his morning rounds.

Despite all the merriment, The Midnight Fair is much more than a cute story about animals having fun. It’s entertaining and clever, but it never devolves into flippancy or silliness. Unhampered by the solidity and clarity of text, it maintains an ethereal aura of mystery and a sense of quiet dignity not often found in picture books with anthropomorphic animal protagonists.

Every inch of illustrator Di Giorgio’s art is captivating, from a scene in which the silhouetted creatures’ eyes glow in the dusk as they emerge from the woods to a poignant moment by the lake near the story’s end. But when the carnival lights come on, her illustrations become truly spellbinding. Gleaming and golden, The Midnight Fair radiates magic. It’s truly exceptional.

Acclaimed author and illustrator Peter Sís movingly celebrates Nicholas Winton, a “quiet hero of the Holocaust” in Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued.

After briefly depicting Winton’s childhood in England, Sís turns to his years as a young man in Europe, swiftly setting the stage and laying out the stakes: Germany, under Nazi rule, is beginning to flex its military might. Instead of going on a ski vacation in the winter of 1938, “Nicky" accepts a friend’s invitation to come to Prague and changes the course of history. 

Next, Sís introduces 10-year-old Vera Diamantova, an ardent cat lover in Czechoslovakia in 1938. When the German army marches into the Sudetenland, a region on the Czech-German border, Diamantova’s parents decide to put her on a train to England. Her mother has heard about an Englishman who helps children escape the Nazis. “The Englishman,” Sís emphasizes, using a larger font for this sentence, “was Nicky.” Winton ultimately saved a total of 669 children. 

Sís relates these events with expert pacing as he juggles Winton’s extraordinary feat; Diamantova’s departure from her home and subsequent new life in England, as well as the loss of her family to Nazi concentration camps; a timeline of the war itself; and the quiet lives both led after the war ended. Winton "never told anyone about the children,” Sís writes. Nicky & Vera concludes with an appearance Winton made on the popular BBC television program “That’s Life” in the late 1980s that saw him reunite with some of the now grown children he saved.

Detailed, intricate illustrations on a muted palette of earth tones capture it all. Sís frequently and movingly incorporates smaller drawings inside of larger images. In the blueish spread in which Diamantova arrives at the train station in London, Sís shows a silhouette of her figure from behind; he fills the silhouette with colorful scenes of the family and home she left behind, a beloved cat and horse and the landscape of her home country.

In a closing note that provides more detail about Winton and Diamantova, Sís writes that he always revered more celebrated individuals, but “had not paid enough attention to the reluctant and quiet heroes.” This tenderly crafted, visually layered and deeply reverent book will help young readers do just that.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Peter Sís reveals what he learned about heroism as he wrote and illustrated Nicky & Vera.

Author and illustrator Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson, who received both Newbery and Caldecott recognition for their 2015 collaboration, Last Stop on Market Street, team up for a third time on Milo Imagines the World, a nuanced tale about the fallacies of first impressions.

Milo and his older sister take long monthly subway rides together, though their destination isn’t revealed until the end of the book. With notebook and pencil in hand, Milo draws the lives he imagines for the people he sees on the train. These include a “whiskered man” whom Milo sketches returning home alone to a messy apartment, a primly dressed boy and his father depicted as living in a castle and a woman in a wedding dress who celebrates a festive wedding to a man.

When he arrives at the detention facility to visit his mother, Milo sees the boy he drew on the train and realizes that “maybe you can’t really know anyone just by looking at their face.” He begins to envision different lives for the strangers than those he drew on the subway. Perhaps the woman in the wedding dress married another woman or that whiskered man went home to his loving family.

De la Peña’s prose is precise and evocative (Milo is “a shook-up soda” of nerves), full of pleasant verbs (the train “bucks back into motion”). His story respects young readers by incorporating their complex interior worlds and the observant ways they attend to issues of class. When "a crew of breakers" exits the train, for example, and "faces still follow their every move," Milo imagines that the breakers will be subjected to racist micoaggressions when they step outside the subway.

Robinson’s signature collage illustrations bring Milo and his sister’s distinct personalities to life. Milo is bespectacled and wears an eye-catching lime-colored knit hat, and his sister is deeply distracted by her phone. Milo’s own simple drawings capture his childlike sense of wonder without ever patronizing.

A thoughtfully crafted addition to the small canon of books about children with an incarcerated parent, this sweet but never saccharine story is a classic in the making.

You might think that, if a mouse were to become a graffiti artist, they would use creamy yellow paint in tribute to delicious cheese. But the prolific and eponymous(e) spray-painter in Anonymouse favors a bright berry pink that pops against the brown and beige city buildings and streets where they live and work.

As digitally drawn by Italian illustrator Anna Pirolli, Anonymouse’s striking and funny acts of guerrilla art offer encouragement to other urban-dwelling animals who are surrounded by high-rises and concrete, rather than trees and grass. In the painter’s tiny paws, satellite dishes become big-headed flowers, trompe l’oeil technique turns a dumpster into a chic raccoon cafe, and a well-placed image of a pink-winged bat alerts a traveling colony of the flying mammals that a nearby warehouse is a prime hangout spot.

Anonymouse paints high in the sky and deep down underground, sending out cheeky signals to ants, birds and dogs alike. Animals and humans frolic in the faux shade of painted trees, enjoying the literal and figurative color added to their lives by the stealthy artist. But alas, Anonymouse must eventually move on. As the bright pink paint fades to a soft rose glow, the animals know their lives have been forever changed, and even more exciting, they begin to create art themselves.

Regardless of whether Canadian author Vikki VanSickle drew inspiration from the activist-artist Banksy or the Swedish artist collective Anonymouse, she has created a charming and clever rodent rebel whose work, she writes, “always made the animals of the city think.” Anonymouse is a poetic and visually witty paean to the power of creativity and the ability of art to inspire and unite us. Readers will enjoy wondering what Anonymouse could be up to right now and will surely consider their own surroundings in a new, imaginative light.