Lami’s Nigerian home is part of a large compound where many other children and families live—not to mention cattle, goats, chickens and one grand old baobab tree, in whose shade the elders gather to converse.

In the compound, everyone is good at something. Lami’s sister Sadia is a spelling whiz. Fatima, Lami’s friend, is the fastest hair-braider around. And Lami has a special talent, too: She’s the best chicken catcher around.

Catch That Chicken! follows Lami as she zips across the bustling compound in pursuit of one fleeing fowl after another. “Get that chicken,” her grandmother shouts as Lami darts under laundry lines draped with brightly printed clothing. Hot on the chase, Lami zooms through a cattle pin and a schoolyard. When a chicken squawks up the branches of the baobab tree, Lami is undeterred.

The elders plead for care when they see her her teetering overhead, but Lami only has eyes for the object of her fowl pursuit. She creeps down a broad, sweeping branch, readies herself to lunge and then—CRASH! How will Lami catch chickens with an injured ankle?

Nigerian-born author and storyteller Atinuke’s clever narrative and Angela Brooksbank’s vibrant mixed-media illustrations bring an entire community to life in just a few pages. The book’s text makes excellent use of repetition and alliteration, ensuring a read-aloud hit that young readers will beg to hear again and again. Brooksbank’s images complement the text perfectly; her use of double-page spreads to set the scene and sequential panels to convey the action of Lami’s chases is the work of an illustrator who uses every inch of the page to its fullest potential.

Rooted in the wonderful specificity of everyday life in Nigeria, this tale of wit and perseverance has universal appeal. Catch That Chicken! is a joy.

Kittens are furry balls of unbridled energy, careening around the house at lightning speed and then plunging into sleep wherever they happen to land. They’re adorable and fearless agents of household delight and chaos. In Joy, Yasmeen Ismail and Jenni Desmond winningly capture kittenhood for an aptly titled read-aloud. 

A gray tabby kitten named Joy bats and flings around a red ball of yarn with abandon: “Jingle jangle, wriggle wrangle, in a tangle.” Desmond’s swooping lines expertly and entertainingly evoke a kitten in perpetual motion, a smile always on her face, the brightly colored house her playground. A stripey brown cat and an enormous dog observe Joy’s hijinks with tolerant amusement, perhaps recalling their own wild younger days—until, unable to resist, they join in on the fun. 

And then! Joy takes a tumble and scares herself into stillness. Mama Cat gives Joy a soothing hug while Dog stands supportively by as they tell her, “I think you’re going to be just fine. Give yourself a little time.” Readers will cheer to watch as, fortified by this reassurance, Joy recovers lickety-split and triumphantly rubber-bands around the room once again.

Ismail and Desmond’s take on tiny felines is hilarious and sweet. Ismail’s giggle-inducing onomatopoeic rhymes wend their way through Desmond’s kinetic (kitten-ic?) artwork, as Joy’s exclamatory inner monologue amusingly punctuates the whirlwindy, somersaulting sequences. Desmond’s heavy pencil strokes are enervated by her vivid watercolors, and she uses white space to excellent effect during Joy’s manic moments, providing necessary breathing room for zooming and boinging galore. 

Joy is a warm and funny testament to the energy of youth, the rejuvenating powers of a comforting hug and the resilience of those who feel supported with love.

Evoking the setting of author Patricia MacLachlan’s Newbery Medal-winning classic, Sarah, Plain and Tall, Prairie Days is a vibrant celebration of daily life on a prairie farm. The simple but lyrical narrative follows a young girl through her memories of summer under “a sky so big, there was no end of it.” Although a precise date isn’t provided, elements in the illustrations—such as the designs of cars, a scene at a filling station and an old locomotive by a granary—suggest a bygone era, perhaps the early 1940s. 

The unnamed narrator shares recollections of horses, who pulled plows and wagons, and farm dogs, including herders Bucky and Prince, “brave dogs who ate well and slept well and loved their work.” She takes dips in the farm’s pond and excursions to the general store to buy cloth, tools, pencils and penny mints. The natural world is omnipresent, manifesting itself in wild roses and hollyhocks, grouse and magpies, herds of sheep and howling coyotes.  

The book’s large, wide format creates a fitting canvas for spectacular art by illustrator Micha Archer. Her images combine collage illustrations done with acrylics and inks with original textured papers to form a kaleidoscope of brilliant colors. While the intricate, sweeping landscapes of open fields and big skies are a feast for the eyes, Archer also excels in depicting minute details. The general store, for example, features old kitchen utensils, brightly patterned bolts of fabric and enticing jars of candy, and the lace curtains in the girl’s bedroom almost seem to swing in a real breeze. The end result is breathtaking on almost every spread, and Prairie Days is certain to be ranked among the most beautifully illustrated picture books of the year.

As the day and the story come to a close, the girl nestles with a flashlight under a quilt, blank paper before her—a clever acknowledgment that her day, unlike other childhood memories lost to time, will live on through her words and pictures.

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.

“Once we were part of Outside and Outside was part of us,” opens Outside In, a lyrical and sensory exploration of the artificial separation between indoors and outdoors from author Deborah Underwood (The Quiet Book) and illustrator Cindy Derby.

A girl sits in the back seat of a car that drives toward a house, and Underwood reminds us that often, even when we are outside, we are still inside. Yet the Outside uses light, insects, noise, weather, enticing smells and much more to nudge us and ask us to step out and explore.

For much of the book, the girl remains indoors, where she experiences how the natural world supports us even while we’re in our houses, providing us with berries to eat, cotton clothes to wear and wooden furniture to sit on. Underwood also points to the ways nature enters our homes, through faucets that run with water from rivers and streams, and through windows that mark our days with the rising and setting sun.

Cindy Derby’s wispy, delicate illustrations toy evocatively with light and shadow. Her atmospheric spreads are never cluttered, leaving lots of open room for young readers to imaginatively inhabit the girl’s world. In a spread about how the Outside “sends the sunset and shadows inside to play,” Derby paints the girl on the verso and her cat on the recto; between them lies abundant space for readers to rest their eyes, and for those enigmatic shadows to dance.

Outside In is a beguiling, thought-provoking book that thinks outside the box.

From once-green leaves turning brilliant hues each autumn to our own eventually graying hair, our brief time together is marked by constant change. Pausing to reflect on life’s transience may inspire sadness, but in Things That Go Away, author-illustrator Beatrice Alemagna reminds us that change isn’t always an occasion for sorrow. 


Things That Go Away uses simple, image-driven language and engaging artwork to explore its titular concept. Between each spread of Alemagna’s signature oil paintings is a sheet of sparsely illustrated onion paper. With each turn of this translucent paper, Alemagna reveals things that vanish or are transformed, from the relenting pounding of rain that gives way to sunshine to music that fills a room only to dissolve into silence.

While the loss of a friend may cut us to the quick, other changes in our lives can be welcome, even joyful. Among the many transitions Alemagna includes are acknowledgements of the sweet solace that comes at the end of a fear-filled night and the relief we experience when the dense fog of dark thoughts finally clears. Through illustrations of steam unfurling from a morning cup of coffee and soap bubbles blown into the wind that drift upwards beyond the reach of giggling children’s fingertips, Alemagna suggests that we might find everyday transformations wondrous, rather than mundane, if we would only take the time to stop and consider them.

In spread after spread, Alemagna meditates on the wide range of changes we face as we live our lives. If this were all Things That Go Away accomplished, it would be enough. But in its ending, the book achieves much, much more. In her book’s final moments, Alemagna pivots from reflecting on things that change to show us, instead, something that endures. In a world adrift in change, Alemagna seems to say, something must anchor us, and for her, that something is love.

Brook’s Mimi isn’t “just a grandmother,” she’s also “a grand friend” who weaves “words into everything.” The same could be said of The Keeper of Wild Words, Brooke Smith’s celebratory picture book that delivers an urgent plea to young readers. 

Brook hopes to find something interesting to bring to show and tell on the first day of school, but on this late summer day, Mimi also has an important mission. She takes Brook on a hike and asks her to be her Keeper of Wild Words, a protector of the words Mimi fears are disappearing. She gives Brook a piece of notebook paper with wildlife words such as drake, monarch, starling and wren. As they walk through woods, meadows and streams, Brook and Mimi marvel at the natural delights they find. “Do wild words dance like this every morning?” Brook wonders.

In an author’s note, Smith explains that her story was inspired by The Oxford Junior Dictionary’s removal of more than 100 entries to make room for words like database, MP3 player and vandalism. The resulting tale is an inspirational commemoration of such “lost” words. Its final page contains a built-in pouch for readers, along with an appeal: “You can be a keeper too. Your wild worlds will stay safe inside this envelope.”

Madeline Kloepper’s vivid illustrations are the perfect accompaniment to Smith’s rallying cry. Her pages are bright with red poppies, swooping starlings and beavers frolicking in a pond near a grassy shore. Readers will practically feel a puff of wind as Brook blows a cascade of dandelion seeds into the air, and they’ll hush to Mimi’s shushing as the pair passes a doe snoozing amid the ferns. Every spread is filled with wonder and warmth, not just for the natural world but also for the bond between grandmother and grandchild.

The Keeper of Wild Words is an irresistible invitation to a wild and wonderful linguistic crusade.