Latest Blog Posts: Children's (page 16)

“Penda lived in a tiny village in Africa with her mum and her aunties.” Thus begins Stephen Davies’ spunky Don’t Spill the Milk!, illustrated by Christopher Corr, set for release in a couple of weeks from Andersen Press.

The book, first published in Great Britain this year, is set during “rainy season,” and Penda’s father is stationed in the grasslands, taking care of the sheep. When Penda’s mum tells her one day that she’s heading there to take ...

What do the three picture books in this column today have in common? Nothing, really. Except that they are all August releases. That’s about it. I couldn’t decide which one to write about, so I’ll tell you a bit about all three. It’s that simple.

Sound like a plan? Good.

First up is Jacqueline Woodson’s This is the Rope: A Story from the Great Migration, illustrated by James Ransome and set to be released in a few weeks. Though it’s ...

Back in 2012 at my site, Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, an illustrator I’d not heard of left a comment at one of my posts. Intrigued, I went to visit his site, and I was blown away by his illustration work featured there. It was then we began a correspondence and I learned his debut picture book would be released this year. Lucky for me, I even got to see a very early copy of the book.

That book is ...

In 2010, Bruce Eric Kaplan, a New Yorker cartoonist, released his debut picture book called Monsters Eat Whiny Children. I wrote about it back then on my own site, Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. I believe I used the phrase “funny as hell” to describe it. It’s dry-humored, possesses a subtle wit and is unabashedly quirky—though not quirky merely for the sake of being quirky, thank heavens.  

These things define the kind of picture book I tend to love ...

I bet it’s challenging to match an author up with illustrator Isabelle Arsenault. I think her artwork is really beautiful—stark and evocative and lyrical, all at once—and I suppose it’d be easy for her captivating illustrations to outshine a picture book text. I get inordinately excited whenever I see that she has a new book being released.

In her newest illustrated title, Once Upon a Northern Night, she’s paired with author Jean E. Pendziwol, whose words here are just as ...

I write and speak about picture books, and I have many friends and colleagues who love children’s literature. So when Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic’s “I’m Tired of Reading Out Loud to My Son, O.K.?” appeared at the New York Times’ website earlier this week, it made some noise in places like my Facebook news feed.

Lucianovic writes about how she dreads reading aloud to her son at night, discussing those books that she hides behind the bookshelf so ...

There are countless picture book adaptations of the classic nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It’s a staple verse for the wee children of the world. But coming to shelves in August from Henry Holt and Company will be a truly bilingual version of this nursery rhyme of American origin. This version, Angela Dominguez’s Maria Had a Little Llama / María Tenía Una Llamita, has a Peruvian twist. (It’s not often you hear “Peruvian twist” with regard to American ...

Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös, who died in 1996, remains a cult figure in the world of mathematics. As far as I can tell, Deborah Heiligman’s new biography of the man—The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdös, illustrated by LeUyen Pham—is the only illustrated picture book that exists that shines a spotlight on his life. And what an intriguing figure he was. He demonstrated, as Heiligman writes in the book’s closing author’s note, that ...