“In the beginning there is light and two wide-eyed figures standing near the foot of your bed, and the sound of their voices is love.”

So begins the much-anticipated new picture book by Matt de la Peña, who won the prestigious Newbery Medal for Last Stop on Market Street, illustrated by Christian Robinson. Now teamed with New York Times bestselling illustrator Loren Long, de la Peña brings his compassionate sensibility to a moving and poetic coming-of-age story—with a twist.

For while the text of Love begins with a baby in a crib and ends with the moment a young person sets off on his or her own, the expansive illustrations go beyond a single child. Instead, each illustration helps to bring alive the author’s poetic exploration of love in all its forms and settings, from cityscapes to flower-strewn meadows. The illustrations embrace 21st-century America as a place of rich, multilayered diversity: We see a child in a wheelchair, a girl in a hijab, a picture of Jesus on a family’s wall, a child fishing with a grandfather and another watching a dad go off to work before dawn.

At the same time, de la Peña and Long don’t shy away from difficult subjects, making this a helpful book for initiating discussions with children. In one scene, a family is glued to the television during what appears to be an unnamed tragedy or disaster; in another, we see a child caught between angry parents.

Love is not simple, but it is enduring. And it is here, around us, sometimes in ways and in places we don’t even notice. Love reminds us of this in simple poetry and evocative illustrations, making it the perfect book to read and return to again and again, whatever age we might be.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Meet the illustrator of Love, Loren Long.

This vertically oriented picture book, first published in Italy in 2015, features a tall tree with a much-coveted nut amid its leafy branches. A small purple mouse stares up at it, declaring that she plans to gobble it up. After she shakes the tree—first to the right and then to the left (expect young readers to excitedly shake the book in solidarity)—a fox, not a nut, falls to the ground. He announces he’ll eat the mouse, who then scurries up the tree.

When the fox shakes the tree in an attempt to oust the mouse, a warthog drops to the ground. The warthog thinks the fox would make a great meal and declares she’ll eat him. Up the tree flees the fox. And so it goes, with a large bear falling from the tree when the warthog shakes it. When all the animals fall to the bear’s feet, the nut falls, too. The animals fear their demise when the bear announces, “I’m going to gobble you up!” Instead, bringing the story full circle, the bear goes straight for the nut.

All the action in Shake the Tree! takes place around the tree, with simple shapes on uncluttered spreads and much top-to-bottom (and vice versa) movement. When each animal faces off with the hungry creature at the bottom of tree, illustrator Silvia Borando opts for horizontal, bright red spreads, the color signifying the danger and alarm at hand. This makes the book’s twist ending all the more surprising for the young readers at whom the book is aimed.

An entertaining and lively read, this one is just right for story-time settings.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

With this wonderful picture book, the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal and her daughter, Paris, encourage young girls to always be bold and fearless.

An advice book of sorts, Dear Girl, is filled with lessons that remind the reader to be inquisitive, to defy gender stereotypes and to love oneself no matter what. But what makes the Rosenthals’ book slightly different from other female empowerment children’s books is that it also stresses the importance of the lesser-known virtues of being bored from time to time, listening to your gut and saying no, and even having a good cry when necessary. Girls can move mountains, but there is no shame in spending a day writing in a journal or staring out the window. Accompanying illustrations from Holly Hatam, a perfect blend of minimalism and whimsy, make this message pop.

Dear Girl, feels like the warm embrace that every parent wants to give their child when the going gets tough. With a sense of wonder, kindness and creativity, this book carries on Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s legacy of being fun and delightful while spreading a message to girls and women of all ages to believe in themselves.

From a young age, we are taught that the Statue of Liberty is a universal symbol for freedom and hope that has stood steadfast over New York Harbor since her dedication in 1886. She has never faltered, never moved—but as author Dave Eggers and illustrator Shawn Harris show us in Her Right Foot, this statue is not exactly stationary.

First, Eggers takes us to France, where absurdist scenes pave the way for Lady Liberty’s creation. (A woman plays a tuba on the street outside a café; the designer of the sculpture emphatically waves a banana.) Through Harris’ cut-paper illustrations and Eggers’ cheeky narration, we follow the statue from her assembly in Paris to her Atlantic Ocean voyage and finally to her arrival at what we now call Liberty Island. Over the course of this 104-page picture book, we learn of her in parts, from her knee to the grim look on her face—a collage to help us see the whole, while also conveying her immense size. But have you ever noticed her right foot?

As a dark-skinned boy and white man look closely, it seems the statue may squash them, as her foot is lifted. “That’s right!” Eggers writes. “She is going somewhere! She is on the move!” Harris plays with perspective as we see Liberty’s shadow looming over people below (you can practically hear the fee-fi-fo-fum) as she strolls through New York City.

“Liberty and freedom from oppression are not things you get or grant by standing around like some kind of statue,” Eggers writes. “No! These are things that require action. Courage. An unwillingness to rest.” In the subsequent breathtaking spreads, Harris zooms in and out in perspective to reveal a refugee camp, Liberty looking out over a bay full of boats and planes, and a mother and child gazing down from an airplane window. “After all,” Eggers writes, “the Statue of Liberty is an immigrant, too. And this is why she’s moving. This is why she’s striding.”

With Her Right Foot, Eggers and Harris achieve something truly remarkable: They make a well-loved symbol seem brand new. Lady Liberty is vital, and what readers of Her Right Foot know and understand about her matters now more than ever.

This French import, originally published last year, opens with an epigraph from Serge Gainsbourg (“To make old bones / You have to go easy”), which reflects the story’s suggestion that life is better when we all slow down.

The young girl who narrates the story introduces readers to Boomer, the fat cat that showed up on her doorstep one day and invited himself to live with the family. She explains how lazy Boomer is—unlike her. She’s hyper-busy and overscheduled. “I don’t have time to cuddle,” she tells the cat. “Get out of my way!” She has soccer, painting, yoga, swim class, judo, pottery and much more on her to-do list.

In a hurry one morning, the girl trips over the snoozing cat, and the pair breaks out into surprised laughter. The cat literally having stopped the girl in her tracks, it’s the first time she pauses to relax and enjoy her day. She and Boomer head outdoors to do “nothing at all,” lounging around, watching the clouds and enjoying one another’s company. Readers get the sense that this is something the girl will make a habit of, given her response to her parents when they ask what she did all day. “Nothing,” she responds with a smile, while giving a tender hug to Boomer.

Roussey’s soft, simply drawn illustrations, primarily pastel-colored, exude a childlike innocence and cheer. The narrator’s voice is engaging and genuine and may convince overscheduled American readers to take a cue from her—to put on the brakes, take a breath and enjoy the day. Boomer, after all, knows best.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

A mother sings her restless child to sleep, offering up a story from her own childhood to help ease the transition to bedtime. The mother is Nina Simone, talking about her own girlhood and the discrimination she faced as she came into her own and discovered her love of music.

The adult Nina, looking back, remembers a church performance at the age of 23, during which her proud mother was asked by white people to remove herself from the front row where she planned to watch her daughter perform. Author Alice Brière-Haquet uses a set of piano keys as a metaphor for the racial injustices of the time: “Black people were nothing but half notes on a huge ivory keyboard.” Later, the adult Nina tells her own child that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial harmony helped turn the tide. Here, illustrator Bruno Liance brings readers black and white protesters with signs; young Nina herself holds one that reads, “Young, Gifted, and Black,” referencing her 1970 song that became an anthem of the Civil Rights movement.

Liance’s illustrations—soft-focus and hazy, just as memories are wont to be—are in black-and-white, matching the author’s sentiment: “Music has no color.” There are moments of great drama on several spreads. More than one features lush trees or flowers bursting forth in unexpected places (from a piano, from the bed of the child Nina is lulling to sleep). One features a lineup of white composers (Mozart, Liszt and the like), followed by young Nina, the only black person pictured, who “played all the important men in powdered wigs from past centuries.” A couple of spreads show a defiant Nina, pushing down her anger to sing to her dismissed mother in the crowd.

Stirring and powerful, the book can be an effective conversation starter with children about racial injustice.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

In what he describes as “an imagined biography,” Allen Say humanizes the troubled and determined American artist James Castle.

Born premature in 1899 in Idaho, Castle was deaf, autistic and probably dyslexic. Undiagnosed for years, he and a sibling were eventually sent to a school for the deaf and blind, to which Castle never acclimated. Sent back home, where he lived in an empty shed or even, at times, a chicken house, Castle was isolated and spent his life creating drawings and handmade books with found materials and soot, using spit as a fixative. He also made cutout dolls, the only friends he had. “He drew from memory and in secrecy,” Say writes. His work is now revered as that of an original artist, one whose art was his vocabulary.

Say tells this fictionalized biography from the point of view of Castle’s nephew, using much creative license. He also varies his style and artistic mediums throughout the book, often drawing with his nondominant hand when recreating Castle’s “unschooled” works. And there’s nary a reproduction to be found; Say faithfully reimagines many of Castle’s pieces using the same materials Castle did—sharp sticks, soot, spit and shoe polish.

This is a haunting story, filled with the stark, striking images of Castle’s memory: faceless teachers with whom he was unable to communicate; children who taunted him; the view from the open door of the attic, where he was often forced to stay as a child; and much more. There was an orderliness to Castle’s art, and Say’s beguiling compositions, which include small vignettes, reflect this. This is an utterly fascinating work.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Allen Say for Silent Days, Silent Dreams.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Children may be familiar with the name Harriet Tubman, and they may even know some of the story of the Underground Railroad. But they probably don’t know Harriet the person—from her days before she led slaves to freedom.

In a clever and poetic take on the life of this famed figure, the dynamic team of Lesa Cline-Ransome and her husband, James E. Ransome, goes backward in time. The book opens with a powerful portrait of a wizened Tubman, tired and worn from her decades of fighting for freedom. With every page turn, short verse takes readers further back, to when Tubman was a suffragist, a nurse, a Union spy, an aunt, a slave known as Minty . . . and a little girl known as Araminta.

It’s important to remember Tubman’s contributions, but it’s even more important to realize that she once was a young girl, full of strength, courage and the will to do something. This is a powerful and poetic biographical sketch ideal for elementary school readers.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Winter Dance, from Newbery Honor winner Marion Dane Bauer and British illustrator Richard Jones, is a gentle tale of the coming of winter in the forest. The lilting language, soothing colors and finely textured artwork engage young readers in a fox’s wonder as snow covers the ground, softening the world around him.

When the fine red fox feels the tingle of the first snowflake settling on his nose, he ponders how to pass the cold winter days ahead. Plenty of creatures are happy to advise him. A caterpillar suggests a cozy chrysalis, but the fox knows a cocoon is not for him. A turtle suggests a dive beneath the cool, snug mud as he disappears into the pond, but the fox isn’t big on ooze. The bats whirring above his head tell him to dip into a cave and hang upside down by his toes, but that won’t work either. The fox decides he should stay put, even as the geese overhead leave for warmer climes.

A snowshoe hare suggests he try the magic trick of turning white to match the “whitening world,” but the fox likes his red fur. Even the great black bear curls up for a long nap, leaving the fox quite alone.

Awake in a sleeping world, the fox feels energized, but the wind soon calms him with a hush. When a low whistle calls, he’s delighted to meet another fine red fox who finally shares what foxes do in winter. They dance!

Billie B. Little is the Founding Director of Discovery Center at Murfree Spring, a hands-on museum in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Everywhere you look, there are living things.” So we learn in this latest offering from a talented author-illustrator team from Great Britain. It’s not easy to translate complex biological principles and concepts into a picture book, but Nicola Davies and Emily Sutton manage to do just that. Their previous collaboration, Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes, explored unseen organisms. Here, Sutton’s jubilant watercolors bring a classic, almost retro look to Davies’ simple, yet informative text about biological diversity.

One unnamed young girl appears in many of the illustrators. There’s a fanciful aspect to design, as our young guide appears in diverse settings and landscapes, sometimes as an observer, other times as a teacher, collector or investigator, complete with safari hat, notebook and pen. (The scene with the girl before a table of mushrooms of all colors and shapes is marvelous!)

The presence of a human in many of the landscapes also underscores an important message of this book. While new species may be found each year, extinction is a reality. In one scene, we find our human girl before a museum case full of extinct specimens. “We have learned that ever kind of living thing is part of a big, beautiful, complication pattern,” Davies writes. “The trouble is, all over the world, human beings are destroying pieces of the pattern.”

Many: The Diversity of Life on Earth is especially appropriate for young children and offers numerous possibilities for learning about colorful plants and animals. And while a bibliography and information on environmental activism would have added to its usefulness in a classroom setting, it is sure to be enjoyed by nature lovers of all ages.

With precise, poetic language and rich colors, author Barbara Herkert and illustrator Lauren Castillo bring to life the legendary author E.B. White.

Readers first meet young Elwyn White at home, sick in bed. It is here he makes a mouse for a friend, eventually carrying him to the family’s horse barn. Young Elwyn loves animals. Herkert plants the seeds in these childhood moments for the famous children’s books Elwyn, who later becomes “Andy,” grows up to write: We see him as a boy, sitting in the barn with his friend, the mouse, staring up a spider’s “masterpiece” of a web.

Herkert spends most of the first half of the book focused on White as a child. He dreaded school yet learned to love writing. With vivid imagery and pleasing alliteration, she captures his idyllic childhood and budding love for language: “As Elwyn grew, he surveyed the summer stars. . . . He jotted his reflections in a journal.” In college, he begins his writing career in earnest, and soon after that is inspired to write Stuart Little while dreaming on a train ride. The last part of the book gives a fine-tune focus to his life with his wife and family at their home in Maine. Here, he writes Charlotte’s Web. Just as in his childhood, he “basked in the seasons, the peace of the barn, the beauty of the world.”

Castillo’s thickly outlined, textured mixed-media illustrations communicate much warmth, with deep reds and oranges and intimate pastoral scenes, whether it’s young Elwyn with his animal friends or elderly Andy in his barn, mesmerized by a spider in her web. In this beautiful spread, we see the silhouette of a pig pointing right to Andy and the spider, with the land, water and a setting sun right behind him.

Inspiring.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

Both a compelling story and an intimate look at ancient life, Nile Crossing shines with the ancient Egyptian canon—hieroglyphics, the Nile and scarab beetles—and will fill multiple roles in any library.

Against the backdrop of Egypt’s lush Nile River and the bustling city of Thebes, author Katy Beebe introduces readers to Khepri, a serious, curious and introspective child on his way to school for the first time. Using the Egyptian language of hieroglyphics to illuminate Khepri’s story, Sally Wern Comport’s illustrations feel like hieroglyphics come to life: vibrant and detailed, yet resonating with the style of ancient Egypt. As though painting on papyrus, Comport uses color and texture to create the dense night, the lush vibrancy of the Nile, the warmth of Khepri’s home, the hum of Thebes.

For those interested in ancient Egyptian culture and life, Nile Crossing provides an insider’s view. Imbued within the tale and the artwork are the Nile River’s vital role, the significance of the gods and the value of the land and family. While it seems Khepri’s story ends too soon, readers will be delighted to find passages about ancient schools, papyrus and ink, as well as the first hieroglyphic lesson he learns. A glossary of terms and titles for further reading round out this brilliant book.

Well-researched and passionately created, Nile Crossing might be one of the most fascinating, educational and unique books of the year. Beebe writes about her lifelong fascination with ancient Egypt; this book could very well launch a new generation of Egyptologists.

Transforming a well-known poem into a picture book is precarious work—even more so when you’re dealing with the words of an American icon. It seems an all but impossible task to ensure such a book would appeal to readers of all ages, but Miyares does just this with his reworking of Langston Hughes’ classic poem “Dream Variations,” first published in 1926.

With its eye-catching watercolors and picture book format, That Is My Dream! offers a new generation easy entrée to one of America’s seminal poets. But, as a work of recontextualization, That Is My Dream! speaks in a voice not wholly Hughes’ own. The words have not changed; the telltale rhythms and rhymes remain. But the tenor has shifted, if only subtly.

Though visually intriguing, Miyares’ deft brushwork presents a fairly conservative take on Hughes’ original. Rather than emphasizing resonances between Hughes’ dream of racial equality and acceptance and the dreams of modern-day minorities, Miyares draws the reader’s gaze backward toward historical oppressions—African-Americans forced to the back of a bus, relegated to “Colored Only” water fountains. Further, its presentation of a stereotypical family, headed by a man and woman, all but erases the original poem’s subtle nod toward living in the closet, a particularly interesting decision given the long-running debate around Hughes’ sexuality.

For all its political trepidation, That Is My Dream! is an engaging work, both verbally and visually. And, like Hughes’ best poems, it offers readers a glimpse into the heart of one whose dreams of equality and acceptance were deferred, time and time again.