2022 Gift Guide: The Picture Books
November 10, 2022 § Leave a comment
With so many spectacular stories, every year it gets harder to narrow down a list of picture books for my Gift Guide. I’ve weighted this year’s list towards fall releases, hoping to ensure that the titles will be new to you or your gift recipient. But I also made exceptions. There were a few books published in the first half of the year that stand the test of time, and I couldn’t imagine a 2022 favorites list without them (Bathe the Cat, Knight Owl, and Endlessly Ever After).
I’ve also concentrated on books that feel inherently gifty. These are books you could gift to almost any child, regardless of how well you know them, and be confident that they’d be charmed and you’d be heroic. If I was strictly making a “best of” list, I would have added titles like Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky.
If space and time permitted, I’d remind you of all the books I’ve already blogged about this year (because I only blog about books I love). As well as others I’ve highlighted on Instagram, like Mina, Does a Bulldozer Have a Butt?, Izzy and the Cloud, and Poopsie Gets Lost.
Finally, before we get started, I’ll remind you that I kicked off the Gift Guide a few weeks ago with My Favorite Picture Book of the Year: Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s fresh telling of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. I won’t repeat myself here, but don’t forget that if you really want to wow your audience, that’s the ticket.
But, of course, these others are incredibly special, too. Presented here from youngest to oldest. (As always, links support the lovely indie where I work as the kids’ buyer. We ship!)
« Read the rest of this entry »Sometimes Reality Trumps Fiction
March 19, 2013 Comments Off on Sometimes Reality Trumps Fiction
For the past year, my five year old has been obsessed with sorting out fiction from fact. “But did that really happen?” is a common question when we are reading stories, delivered with a furrowed brow and a skeptical tone (as if we as parents are deliberately trying to dupe him with our choice of fictitious books). “Swans can’t really talk and that’s how I know that this story did not really happen,” he announced with confidence at the dinner table one night, after fervently recounting the chapter his class had read that afternoon from The Trumpet of the Swan.
More and more, it would seem, JP has decided that stories are synonymous with make-believe. So, in an effort to challenge his thinking (and because it’s fun to blow his mind), I have been on the hunt for seemingly far-fetched stories that are actually based on real events. Lucky for us—and for our daughter who is obsessed with ducks right now—Eva Moore and Nancy Carpenter’s new Lucky Ducklings (Ages 2.5-6) is just such a story—and an actual rescue story at that.
What to Read to Your Kids 