Author-illustrator Heidi Woodward Sheffield’s wonderfully detailed and brilliantly colored collages burst off the pages of Brick by Brick, her first picture book.

From his window high up in a brick apartment building, Luis gazes and waits for his Papi to return. Scraps of lace and fabric embroidered or printed with plaids and stripes festoon the windows. The little boy’s Papi is a bricklayer, with strong arms “like stone,” good for lifting little boys onto shoulders. In first-person narration, Luis draws parallels between his Papi’s work and his own daily school routine. While his Papi builds tall buildings one brick at a time, Luis learns “book by book.” Papi uses a level, slaps on the mortar and scrapes off the excess. At school, Luis pats and rolls clay to make a tiny dog and a little house.

As Luis works, he dreams of having “nuestra casa para siempre,” an “always house” for him and his family, with space for his mother to have a garden and for him to have the dog he dreams of. Whether they are working on sky-high scaffolding or climbing playground equipment at recess, neither Luis nor his Papi are afraid of heights—and neither is afraid to dream or to work hard to achieve their goals. Their story builds to “una sorpresa,” which is to say, a surprise.

Sheffield masterfully pairs her heavily textured, layered illustrations with language that is rich and pulls out sensory details that make Brick by Brick an excellent choice for reading aloud. A mortar mixer whirrrrrrrs as Papi scrrrrapes away excess mortar; the “kerchunk” of Papi’s lunch box is especially satisfying. Sheffield’s mixed media collages, which incorporate photographs, create a vibrant and lively cacophony that overflows with bold color, chunky shapes and friendly faces, welcoming readers immediately into Luis’ world. Luis’ sweet, plainspoken narration will endear him to readers immediately, making the surprise awaiting him at the end of the story feel like a triumph.

Oh, the joy of wandering around outside on a lush summer day!

Antoinette Portis’ A New Green Day captures perfectly the delight of exploring the natural world with a curious mind and an open heart. In the author-illustrator’s inventive hands, everyday things become extraordinary and the prosaic becomes poetic. A green leaf’s veins strikingly emulate the tree from which the leaf fell, and a rainstorm becomes “a chorus of a million tiny voices.”

From sunrise to sunset, clever riddles create a call-and-response between the book and its readers, their proxy a little girl who skips about the pages, long braids a-twirl. The solutions to each riddle revealed though the turning of a page. “I’m a comma in the long, long sentence of the stream,” says . . . the tadpole! And “a candy sucked smooth in the river’s mouth?” That’s a smooth speckled stone. The guessing-game aspect of the book offers a lovely way to spark discussion and wonderment, suitable for younger kids who are only beginning to learn about nature, as well as older kids who will get a kick out of debating the answers to each of the questions.

Portis invites young readers (and the adults who may share the book with them) to look at things in an entirely new way, to challenge their impressions of the familiar and allow for new interpretations of what they see. Her spare yet powerful verses are sure to spark an increased engagement with our environment, which will in turn serve to make nature more relevant to curious children.

Fittingly, a range of textures in the illustrations make the book a visual feast. There are concentric ripples in water and tiny grains of sand, sharp slices of lightning and blurry daubs of mud. In A New Green Day, weather and light and living things coexist as they inhabit and create each new tomorrow. It’s an engaging tribute to our surprising and awe-inspiring natural world, an invitation to get outside and experience each day through the lens of our vivid, ever-changing imaginations.

Captain Swashby is a reclusive, elderly man with an impressively unkempt beard. Having retired to a small house by the seashore, he is just fine with his “salty and sandy and serene” life of solitude in in Beth Ferry and Juana Martinez-Neal’s charming Swashby and the Sea.

That is, until unwelcome new neighbors appear: a girl and her grandmother. Captain Swashby leaves messages for them in the sand that state, in no uncertain terms, his desire that they skedaddle—but the waves alter his warnings by erasing some of the letters. The water turns “NO TRESPASSING” into “SING.” “NOW VANISH!” becomes “WISH!” Of course, the joyful, bespectacled girl follows the sandy directives, even breaking into song on Swashby’s deck. It seems the curmudgeonly captain’s continued attempts to live a quiet life are destined to be thwarted by both the ocean and his neighbors’ desire for his companionship.

Illustrations by Caldecott Honoree Martinez-Neal (Alma and How She Got Her Name, Fry Bread) give the curious girl much energy and spunk, and evoke the seaside with warm, earth-toned hues. Beth Ferry (Stick and Stone, The Scarecrow) has fun with Captain Swashby’s spirited dialogue (“What are ye up to, ye great salty imp?” he asks the girl at one point), and builds a tenderness to his transition from solitude to neighborliness that never becomes saccharine. “THANK YE, FRIEND,” he writes in the sand after he realizes “neighbors could be fun.” Fittingly, the waves turn this message into “THE END” on the final page. Swashby and the Sea is a picture book with a heart as big and boundless as the ocean.

A young girl and her parents enjoy idyllic summers by the bay year after year in The Little Blue Cottage, an endearing celebration of summer traditions and the ways those traditions inevitably change over time.

Author Kelly Jordan succinctly conveys the child’s bond to this special place. Days at the cottage are filled with sensory fun—the songs of seagulls, the smells of pancakes and sunscreen, the sight of boats with colorful sails in the distance. The cottage is a home away from home where the girl plays boisterously and, in quieter moments, sits on a window seat in a cozy alcove, gazes out at the waves and tells the cottage, “You are my favorite place.”

Illustrator Jessica Courtney-Tickle’s vibrant art imbues the cottage and its inhabitants with a classical feel while retaining a modern sensibility. The blue cottage gleams beside the bay’s turquoise waves and shimmers amid green hills and grass. Courtney-Tickle’s use of varying frame and image sizes is admirably effective, as in one spread composed of three long, horizontal panels that show the girl growing older and taller each year while befriending a redheaded boy.

Eventually, years creep by with no summer visitors at all, and the cottage grows dilapidated. Then one glorious day, the girl—now a mother—returns with her daughter, her redheaded husband and her white-haired father. Times do indeed change, but readers will find reassurance in this reminder that traditions can endure, even as they are transformed and passed on to new generations.

The image on the title page of Love, Sophia on the Moon immediately establishes the story’s stakes. Sophia is in time-out for having broken a vase while playing rambunctiously inside the house. So she heads out the door, towing along her pink backpack and pet cat, having left behind a note for her mother: “I’m running away. . . . From now on, I live on the moon.” The note kicks off a flurry of communiques between mother and daughter in this tender, funny epistolary tale.

Spreads alternate between Sophia’s adventures on the moon with her new friend, a unicorn named Frurgbert, and her unperturbed mother at home, straightening up Sophia’s bedroom. Observant readers will spot clues in the room—such as a stuffed unicorn and a night light that projects stars onto the ceiling—that hint that Sophia’s journey may be more imaginative than astronautical. All the while, Sophia’s mother patiently reminds Sophia of the good things that await her, including her favorite bedtime story and homemade cookies, should she decide to return home.

Illustrator Mika Song conveys the ups and downs of Sophia’s interior world with soft, relaxed watercolors. Hand-lettered notes between mother and daughter add intimacy to their communication. 

With clear affection, author Anica Mrose Rissi (best known for her Anna, Banana series) captures the determination and obstinacy of children and the steady, unwavering love of a parent. In one of her letters, Sophia’s mother provides a memorable expression of this unconditional love: “Even when you’re mad, I love you to the moon.”

Author Suzanne Slade has penned numerous picture book biographies about visionary women (A Computer Called Katherine and Dangerous Jane). In Exquisite: The Poetry and Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, she turns her attention to the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Though Brooks grew up in poverty, her family’s home was lined with shelves that held books of poetry, a “great treasure.” They valued the written word, and writing “became like eating and breathing” for the young Brooks. She wrote her first poem at the age of 7 and was published in a magazine by the time she was 11.

Slade explores the impact of the Great Depression on Brooks’ family, as well as her misfit status at school. Through it all, her poems kept flowing. During college, marriage and motherhood, money was always tight, but Brooks continued writing and dreaming of a better future. Finally, Brooks secured publication for a collection of poetry.

Slade writes that Brooks’ words “helped people better understand others,” likening them to “bright, brilliant clouds.” Illustrator Cozbi A. Cabrera incorporates warm, luminous clouds repeatedly throughout the book. The final spread shows the exuberant moment in which Brooks learns that she has won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Cabrera depicts Brooks dancing for joy with her son in their home on the South Side of Chicago, their living room window framing a brilliant sunset and wispy blue clouds.

Exquisite quotes frequently from Brooks and her work, a smart choice by Slade that allows readers to experience for themselves the poet’s extraordinary voice. This vibrant portrait is a fitting introduction to a groundbreaking poet.

A young indigenous girl learns the importance of water from her elders, then unites with her community and its supporters to defend it in Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade’s inspiring new picture book, We Are Water Protectors.

The unnamed girl’s grandmother teaches her that water is sacred, “the first medicine” that nourishes human life both in the womb and on Mother Earth. The girl’s community believes in a prophecy about a black snake that will threaten the water. Illustrator Goade depicts the snake with a series of angular turns that call to mind the oil pipelines which have been the subject of protests in recent years; the snake’s forked red tongue and red eyes are a menacing touch. The girl strikes powerful poses and holds hands with others to stand against the snake. Together, the communities confront the snake, fighting it on behalf of all the lives that depend on the water.

Throughout the book, Lindstrom, who is Anishinabe/Metis and tribally enrolled with the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, employs a powerful refrain that asserts the continued presence and ongoing commitment of indigenous peoples: “We stand with our songs and our drums. We are still here.” Her prose is powerful, timely and mesmerizing in its lyricism. Goade, who is an enrolled member of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, employs deep blues, purples and aquamarines to create enchanting waterscapes that envelope human figures whose skin she represents in a variety of hues. She weaves symbols from Ojibwe culture into the vibrant scenes, which blend images of people, animals and nature together into a striking and precious tapestry of interdependent life. It all adds up to a gorgeous and empowering picture book with an urgent environmental plea.