2021 Gift Guide: The Show Stoppers
November 18, 2021 § 6 Comments

Those of us raising bibliophiles—or, should I say, those of us prone to over-indulging on books all year long—are sometimes stumped about what to wrap up for the holidays. What books differentiate themselves as holiday-worthy? Of course, I personally think a great book is as much at home under a Christmas tree as packed in with the groceries on a random Thursday…but I do appreciate that some books have show-stopping power.
And so, I give you these selections for kids and tweens. With a promise that parents will enjoy them almost as much.
« Read the rest of this entry »Cicada Frenzy (A Father’s Day Post)
June 10, 2021 § 1 Comment
(Past years’ Father’s Day ideas can be found here, here, here, and here.)
The list of things my kids will someday recount to their wide-eyed grandchildren has gotten a lot longer in the past year. First, there was the pandemic. Then, the election (including an insurrection). And now, here in Virginia, we can add the seventeen-year cicada, a rare breed of cicada that hibernates deep underground for seventeen years and then emerges by the billions, filling the air with an incessant, high-pitched siren that could be (if you’re me) initially mistaken for an air raid. These cicadas, living and dead, now line our front steps and cover our shrubs and trees. When they’re not pelting our car windshields or dive-bombing into our hair, their orange-veined wings, protruding red eyes, and undeniable resiliency do inspire something resembling awe.
At least, if you’re my daughter. My teenage son isn’t having any of it. I still shriek every time one lands on me. But my ten-year-old daughter fancies herself something of a Cicada Whisperer. She rescues them from puddles (and my hair). She invites them to crawl on her finger, holds up their two-inch body to her eyes, and examines them closely, reassuring them that she won’t do them harm. As far as I can tell, she spent the last two weeks of the school year setting up hospital wings for cicadas on school grounds and presiding over funerals for the unfortunate ones who didn’t make it.
Not only do I have the perfect new picture book for the budding entomologist in your life, but with Father’s Day around the corner, Ben Brashares and Elizabeth Bergeland’s The Great Whipplethorp Bug Collection (Ages 5-9) does double duty, celebrating a boy, his stay-at-home father, and the globe-trotting grandfathers who came before. It’s a story about summer boredom, the transports of imagination, and the inspiration of backyard bugs. But it’s also a story about a boy questioning his place in a long line of achievers, a boy weighing his own idea of masculinity against that set by traditional gender roles. The writing is pitch perfect, and the art is awesome: quirky and unexpected, a visually enticing combination of tiny pen lines and washes of color that sits somewhere between real life and imagination. Children will love pouring over these pages, and they’ll grow in their understanding of the story’s broader messages with every reading.
« Read the rest of this entry »Earth Day! New Non-Fiction Celebrating Our Planet
April 22, 2021 Comments Off on Earth Day! New Non-Fiction Celebrating Our Planet

Every year on Earth Day, I smile thinking about my son at age four, who looked up at me with his big brown eyes and asked, “Mommy, aren’t we supposed to care about the Earth every day?” Yes, my boy. Same with Black history and women’s history and all the rest of these annual celebrations. But it sure is nice, now and then, to be nudged to think about our home libraries, about how we might freshen them up in a way that leads to better, richer dialogues with our children. After all, books bring with them such marvelous reminders of what a special, precious gift this planet is.
Today, I’m sharing three new non-fiction titles, targeting a range of ages. Each delivers a wealth of information—be it flowers, trees, or climate change—in clever, arresting, beautiful presentations. These aren’t the non-fiction books of our childhood, with tiny type and dizzying details. They’re a testament to a new way of presenting scientific content to kids, one which doesn’t sacrifice visual ingenuity or narrative appeal. They’re books we parents won’t get tired reading. In fact, we’re likely to learn things alongside our children. What better way to model caring for our planet than showcasing our own curiosity and discovery?
« Read the rest of this entry »Emily Dickinson: Perfect Reading for a Pandemic?
September 24, 2020 § 2 Comments
Not many people know this, but my daughter is named after Emily Dickinson. (Well, and the heroine of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon.) I didn’t fall for Emily Dickinson’s poetry until I got to college, when I fell hard and fast and ended up featuring her poems in no fewer than seven essays, including my Senior Thesis. I had never been a big poetry lover, but there was something about the compactness of her poems which fascinated me. So much meaning was packed into such few words. And even then, the meaning was like an ever-shifting target, evolving with every reading.
To read Emily Dickinson is to contemplate universal truths.
Apart from reading Michael Bedard and Barbara Cooney’s 1992 picture book, Emily, I hadn’t had much occasion talk to my own Emily about her namesake. But that changed last spring, when my Emily started writing poetry of her own. Nothing about virtual learning was working for her, until her teachers started leading her and her classmates in poetry writing. Suddenly, my daughter couldn’t jot down poems fast enough, filling loose sheets of paper before designating an orange journal for the occasion. She wrote poems for school, for fun, and for birthday cards. It didn’t matter that they weren’t going to win awards for originality; what mattered was that she had found a means of self-expression during a stressful, beguiling time.
Jennifer Berne’s On Wings of Words: The Extraordinary Life of Emily Dickinson (Ages 7-10), stunningly illustrated by Becca Stadtlander, could not have entered the world at a more perfect time. It opens a dialogue, not only about Dickinson’s unconventional life, but about her poems themselves. At a time when a pandemic has prompted many of us and our children to turn inward, this picture book is less a traditional biography than an homage to the rich interior life developed by this extraordinary poet and showcased in her poetry.
Better Together (Maybe for the Apocalypse, Too?)
February 6, 2020 § 1 Comment
A year or so ago, I was at a summer garden party, all twinkling lights and umbrella drinks, when the conversation took a dark turn. Several folks, none of whom I knew terribly well, began to discuss and debate the provisions they had stored away in the event of an apocalypse. I sat quietly, picturing my own basement with its boxed wedding dress, foosball table, and toys I’d stashed hoping my kids wouldn’t notice so I could gradually move them to the donation bin, and realized how far a cry this was from the scene being described. No crates of non-perishable food, no industrial sized jugs of water, no iodine pills in the event of a nuclear attack, no walkie talkies, no axes, definitely no guns to take down squirrels that could comprise my protein quota.
“Don’t you worry about how you’re going to protect your family?” someone said to me, after I tried to make a joke about my foosball table. I conjured up an image of myself, defending my children against other crazed survivors—all of us presumably reduced to looters or murderers—and I said, only half joking, “In the case of an apocalyptic event, I think it would be best for the future of humanity if my family made a quick exit.” To put it mildly, living off the land in the dark and cold for an extended period of time isn’t really in our wheelhouse.
Last month brought a fresh wave of worry for those of us working hard not to picture End of the World scenarios. We were on the brink of a war with the Middle East. The continent of Australia was burning. A mysterious and deadly virus was (is) rapidly spreading out of China. If we believe apocalyptic-themed fiction, it’s not long until we will be wandering alone in the dark and cold, assuming we are unlucky enough to survive.
And yet, at a time when the news threatens to send us into an ethos of fear and anxiety—to fathom ways of constructing safe houses around our loved ones—children’s literature is there, reliably, with a hefty dose of optimism, a welcome respite from the dark and cold. Especially where gems like Hannah Salyer’s debut picture book, Packs: Strength in Numbers (Ages 5-9), are concerned, we would do well to remember that the animal kingdom has always survived when it turns towards, not away, from one another.
When is a Stone a Story?
September 12, 2019 § 5 Comments
If we want our children to entertain different perspectives when they get to middle or high school—to become critical thinkers and contributors—then they should have opportunities from an early age to consider that there is more than one way to see the world.
Picture book author-illustrator Brendan Wenzel is making something of a name for himself when it comes to creating books for young children about perspective and perception (his groundbreaking debut, They All Saw a Cat, received a Caldecott honor). His newest, A Stone Sat Still (Ages 4-7), similarly rendered with richly textured, mixed-media art and spare, poetic language, stole my heart from the moment I opened it (do yourself a favor and remove the jacket cover, because WOW). Even my children, well outside the target age, were captivated. This is visual storytelling at its best, where every page asks the reader to engage: to wonder, question, and understand. « Read the rest of this entry »
Butterflies and Black Boxes: Helping Shoulder the Burden of Grief
May 2, 2019 § 9 Comments
Grief can be the loneliest feeling in the world. In the immediate aftermath of a great loss, we are often surrounded by an outpouring of love and affection. We receive letters, phone calls, dishes of food, offers of help. But, in the weeks and months ahead, most around us will eventually resume their own lives, leaving us to sit quietly, restlessly, fearfully with our grief. Some will stop mentioning it at all, perhaps worried that talk of it will bring up fresh sadness. Some prefer to stop thinking about it all together, lest the tragedy of what happened to us be contagious. None of this is ill-intentioned. It stems from our basic human instinct to protect and survive.
It may also stem from inexperience.
The new picture book, Maybe Tomorrow? (Ages 4-8), by Charlotte Agell, with illustrations by Ana Ramírez González, is a whimsical, hopeful, deeply touching story about a new friendship forged in the aftermath of grief. It is one of the most delicate and perfect manifestations of grief I’ve ever encountered in a children’s book—but it also does something else. It presents a window into what it’s like to be on the outside of grief. It invites us to empathize with those who are mourning, then gives us some ideas for how to help another shoulder the burden of grief.
When I started college, in the fall of 1994, I had lost my father three months earlier. I had had an entire summer to mourn. To cry, to rage, to field calls from concerned relatives and friends, to fight and make up with my mother and sister more times than I could count. When I walked onto campus that September and neatly unpacked my things into my single room, I felt pressure to put my grief behind me. To fit in. To throw myself into making friends and studying hard and not be known as “the girl who just lost her father.”
And then, suddenly, I couldn’t see.
« Read the rest of this entry »Gift Guide 2018: Wondering What Was
December 7, 2018 § 1 Comment
And the award for the 2018 picture book that I will never tire of reading aloud goes to “A House That Once Was” (Ages 4-7), written by Julie Fogliano and illustrated by Lane Smith. This book is pure loveliness. As always, Fogliano’s contemplative, free-verse lyricism makes us feel at one with our subject—in this case, the mysteries of an abandoned house. As always, Smith’s inventive, breathtaking art transforms the everyday into the extraordinary. (These two brilliant creators have a special claim-to-fame in my blog, as this gem by Fogliano and this one by Smith were the very first books I ever wrote about.) « Read the rest of this entry »