The book would have been perfect at any time, in any age. Despite the nicely labelled dates (example: Saturday, June 7, 1986), it doesn’t feel stuck on any day of any month of any year. And this book is a not insignificant part of why I thought I’d really, really better go to NCTE back in November. I knew Scholastic would be there, and I just desperately wanted to see if I could talk to someone about how I could wheedle a review copy. Well, they just handed me a copy (and then I lost the card of the lovely person who gave me the copy, so I can’t email her this review– I’m bad at this! Sorry, lovely publicist.), so that part was easy.

What’s not easy is writing about it. I read it and my heart swelled and twisted so I wanted to cry. I made my husband read it. I re-read it. I tried and tried to write, and swore, and threw out drafts.

It’s difficult.

Danny, whose voice we hear for most of Run Away With Me, Brian Selznick’s new masterpiece (order from that link to Books of Wonder and you may get a signed copy), also struggles to speak sometimes. Angelo is the more loquacious of the two friends, young men finding each other in Rome. Angelo is the storyteller, but Danny, in his quiet way, elicits stories from Angelo and shares his own.

There is a manuscript, too, which is hidden and found, and the manuscript is in itself a hidden text, the secrets painstakingly unfolded by Danny’s mother, a paleographer.

Oh, yes, that’s right. There is paleography. My one potential quibble: the rare book librarians I know do not currently use white cotton gloves in handling books. Would they have in the 1980s? It’s certainly possible. I feel like Brian Selznick would have covered that in his extensive research. He’s such a thoughtful, careful creator. He doesn’t push books into being before they’re ready. He is eloquent, but not overly wordy. Like Maurice Sendak. Like Margaret Wise Brown. Like Sergio Ruzzier. Brian Selznick crafts his manuscripts deftly and considers them with care.

I flip through my heavily read and creased ARC of the book, and marvel at the work that went into each image and passage. Brian Selznick’s draft work must be art in its own right. I know it without seeing it.

But each of these elements shows the beauty of the silence between the words. As usual in a book by Brian Selznick, much of that silence is visual art, and much of that visual art is an unfolding mystery: connection, misdirection, and brilliant bridges across time and space. Is that one of the boys, maybe Angelo? No! That’s an angel in the church! Wait– no, the angel is Angelo? Or–

The text draws further deft lines between these links, and no I’m not going to explain any of the above, about Angelo or Danny or paleography or the angel in the church, because to do so would wreck your experience in following the delicate strokes of pencil and text, from scene to scene, drawing and description, music and flowing water.

Of all of Brian Selznick’s books, I think this may be his greatest masterpiece to date. I felt a strong pang of recognition in his depictions of aching loneliness and longing for beauty.

“They always seem lonely to me,” I said. “The obelisks.”
“They are lonely,” he answered, as if the objects themselves had been telling him their secrets.

Even when they have each other, Danny and Angelo are aware that the days are ticking down to separation. But Angelo has already told Danny: “To have had a friend,” he said. “Even for a short time. That’s important.”

I think this book will be a friend to many of us.

In November 2017, I wrote a not particularly good but, I recall, intensely felt post about The Wall by Peter Sís. I recall the fear and agitation of the time vividly, and, of course, not much has changed. Some things have, of course, but, ultimately, what I see and hear swirling around me is a kind of misery contest of who is the first under attack: “It always starts with–” fill in the blank with your pick of women, LGBT+ folks, racial minorities, the arts, the intellectuals, the judiciary, or what have you. Historically, it all does start somewhere and with something and someone, I’m absolutely certain, but depending on what “it” is and where you set the goalposts, that will always shift, and–

Truly, it doesn’t matter, because it has already started, and here we are. Trying to figure out when and where it started is, I submit with a marked lack of humility, futile. At this point, we simply need to stop hiding, stop obfuscating, and say: We are living under the shadow of a new fascism.

Instead of blindly running around trying to warn that this is leading somewhere bad, please consider that it already is very bad and that fracturing into splinters of arguments over who’s most under attack is absurd while there’s what Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic called “a Mack-truck-size breach” of security regarding war plans being discussed on Signal. EOs against law firms are putting a damper on lawyers, and while everyone loves to joke about sleazy lawyers and quote Shakespeare out of context, please recall that lawyers with the Department of Justice were methodically, thoroughly, and competently investigating and prosecuting January 6 insurrectionists, a fair number of whom had histories of violent conduct. These lawyers, who were upholding our rule of law and shoring up the integrity of our democracy in the face of an angry government, were fired for the very nature of their work, and the insurrectionists were pardoned.

Thus: this is a growing wave of totalitarian conduct.

And here I am, back to The Wall. And thank God Peter Sís created this masterpiece.

I don’t know a single person who has not, to some degree or other, been affected by this rising totalitarianism. My entire home country of Canada, for example. But also: teachers under scrutiny, scientists facing lost funding, friends with jobs lost or going to bed wondering if they’ll have a job tomorrow, or the biography of the guy who constructed the Sunday crossword noting that he just lost his job as a management consultant for federal agencies in Washington, DC. The maelstrom of chaos is, of course, deliberate, but comes into focus when seen not as a first step but as an accomplished act: totalitarian regimes are not clearly organized, they are incompetent, and discuss war plans on Signal.

I had been thinking of The Wall often, since I see the entire world through a lens of art. Literature, visual art, music: this is how humans have always processed our experiences, of course. The picture book is an ideal medium because it is so limited that the great creator is forced to hone the experience to a synthesized visual and verbal package with the rhythm of a poem when read aloud. I don’t mean that it must be in verse; rather that page turns create the marks of beats and accents of a poem. An ideal picture book works with that rhythm and the constraints of the page and format to distill an experience into a felt experience.

In The Wall, Peter Sís distills growing up under oppression, finding a secret voice, hiding it, and with wave on wave of growing pushes towards liberty from the Soviet regime, finally coming to freedom.

I pulled it from the shelf while fears for Ukraine rose in me, intending to read it to myself or handing it to the Changeling to read with me. She’s 11, and feeling this political climate more keenly than I’d like, but I think every parent has that uneasiness. I did not expect the 4-year-old ballet-loving, twirling Spriggan to ask me to read it to him. I had just heard about the Kennedy Center takeover; on our frequently watched DVD of Swan Lake with the Spriggan’s adored Angel Corella as Prince Siegfried, the performance is on the stage of the Kennedy Center and it opens with a clip from the dedication of the Kennedy Center. My love of the performing arts has deep roots, and one of the joys of my nuclear family is that my husband and children and I all share this taste. So that was back of my mind as we read The Wall.

This is not a book for a 4-year-old, and while he found it interesting and said he liked the art, he very sensibly went to look for other books by the same author that were more at his level, which are thankfully easily available on our shelves. One of my deepest objections to education in schools today is the rush, rush, rush away from picture books, but this is a book for older children, older classes, and families and teachers. It is perfect and it is beautiful, but classrooms and education haven’t kept pace with Peter Sís’s genius and tell children to grow out of picture books by the time they can read to themselves. And yet Grade 7 and 8 should read this.

America to the rescue! I broke down a bit on that one.

We are back to The Wall, and I can’t say what to do or how to function, but I would like to recommend: a) Cohesion rather than competition; b) Read good books, including this one; c) Don’t obscure reality. It doesn’t start with anyone; we are here.

Finally, some words from Jeffrey Goldberg when asked if he feared retaliation: “It’s not my role to care about the possibility of threats or retaliation. We just have to come to work and do our jobs to the best of our ability. Unfortunately, in our society today—we see this across corporate journalism and law firms and other industries—there’s too much preemptive obeying for my taste. All we can do is just go do our jobs.”

“I FOUND MY CALDECOTT PICK!” I shrieked on the way into my husband’s study and I think he was in a meeting but let’s pretend he wasn’t. I was excited.

I had been a bit apprehensive about Let’s Be Bees. I will confess: I was wrong.

I adore Shawn Harris for his whimsically odd approach to picture books, for breaking with orthodoxy in a rather Ruth Krauss-esque way: in Have You Ever Seen a Flower?, the child shouts “HELLO” just to listen for an echo, and something about it reminds me of the jubilant page: “Yell, ‘Good morning, big fat world!'” in Roar Like a Dandelion.

And I keep somehow being nervous with Shawn Harris titles before I see them. I think it’s the presentation of simplicity that deceives me; will it be too empty? I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this is sheer stupidity, probably trauma induced from reading too many breathlessly inane titles about loving the whole world. Shawn managed to write the only book with a tiny pink unicorn that made me laugh and that doesn’t make me foam at the mouth and that I have even gotten as a gift for multiple children.

NB: I routinely lecture adults about the taxonomically incorrect unicorns in books and the media these days. Like, you know, hot pink unicorns. I pull out history books and demonstrate that these are not accurate based on documentary evidence. That Shawn could create a pink unicorn I grudgingly like is nothing short of gobsmacking, and I need to trust to the truth:

Shawn Harris can be trusted with simple books.

You see, not everyone is good enough to do simple well. Above, I compared him to Ruth Krauss, famous for, among others, A Hole Is to Dig. She did something simple and brilliant: she listened to kids. In reading her books, often illustrated by Maurice Sendak, who matched her in his acute and sensitive level of observation and respect for children, one has the sense of tumbling into the world delineated there. The logic is intensely obvious. It cannot be imitated, however, because Ruth Krauss is the one who did the work. She was the observer. Any imitation is going to be cute and coy and patronizing, and I will feel like feeding the offending book to an angry hippopotamus. For example.

Shawn, like Ruth Krauss, does the work. In this interview with Betsy Bird (shared by a friend– thank you, Macy!) he says this thought was the starting point: “Well, that was fun becoming a flower— now I want to be everything else on earth.” That thought catapults straight into the mind of a 4-year-old, and I live with one. Yesterday he was a beaver and a black swan. Usually at different times.

I’ve seen his books described as “weird,” and from an adult perspective, I totally agree. It is absolutely bizarre to have a spread that’s bloodred, just bloody. But we had a guest over who cheerfully told us about his 7-year-old child nemesis who wiped her bloody finger on his cheek to prove to him that she really was bleeding, ok, you stupid grown-up? Blood is visceral, she felt it, she needed him to feel it. And Have You Ever Seen a Flower? really gets that. In Let’s Be Bees, it feels weird to a grown-up to be anything but human, because we’re pretty convinced that’s who we are, see? My experience of 4-year-olds leads me to believe that their species identities are entirely fluid at all times, and the book feels natural to read with one. They move with the shifts. We need a little push to our less elastic brains. It’s a little odd, see.

Look, I’m too wordy. Let me share my Spriggan’s perspective. He wasn’t really feeling like a tree the day we read it, and my attempts to get him to rustle were met with indifference. But we came to what I’m thinking of as “the ROAR spread” and he had a lot to tell me.

“Mama, you read it wrong.”
“What?” I was surprised, a bit, because so far I thought he couldn’t quite read yet, and usually he trusts me to get the words right in books.
“That isn’t a fire.”
“Uh…”
Allow me to show you the spread:

I really, really thought that was a picture of a roaring fire there on the bottom left, so I just kind of stared a bit. I do that an awful lot when a kid is telling me something, because, frankly, I’m so often at a complete loss until I get more clues. (To be honest with you, I think Shawn must be a lot smarter than I am; he seems to get it.)

“Mama, that’s a Firebird. Firebirds don’t roar.”
“Oh! What does the Firebird say?”
He thought. “…tinkle tinkle?”

He didn’t speak with conviction, and I was, I confess, pleased to have stumped him. He’s advanced a few other suggestions, but mostly he thinks it’s important to know that they have Golden Apple trees. When he’s a Firebird, he carries his own tree with Golden Apples around with him, so that’s a Firebird, do we really care what they say? He doesn’t– the Firebirds he knows are from the ballet, and don’t talk, they flutter their wings and pluck Golden Apples from the tree and they’re delicate but stronger than Kotschei the Deathless.

The genius of this book, and it is absolutely genius, it is serious genius, is that it is delightfully weird to the adult reader, and it is natural and delightful to the child reader. It’s a book to read together as a lap read, but it would also work as a classroom read. And I particularly love the cozy framing of it, so gentle, as an adult reading to a child– reading this very book, in fact. That gentle set in image frames the whole experience as a read-together, and puts the adult in the position of entering the child’s world. It is the adult saying, “Let’s be bees.” That imagery puts us, as adults, in the child’s park, and we are joining them in their logical centre.

For children, so often pushed to join us in ours, this is a rare experience. Ruth Krauss gave it to them, Sergio Ruzzier does today, and so does Shawn Harris. I think he’s great. And, Shawn, sorry I ever doubted you.

Let’s be swans!

And this book? This is it. This is my Caldecott pick.

Side note: I must give enormous thanks to the editor, Taylor Norman, for sending this for my Spriggan (who is a Black Swan today), and who dealt with my enthusiastic messages with forbearance.

I did not grow up with the usual Uri Shulevitz books: Snow, for example, I only saw when I was older. The book I associate most strongly with Uri Shulevitz is not his beautiful, Caldecott Medal winning, The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, and it’s not the more recent How I Learned Geography. All of those books are beautiful. They showcase a range of his talents. But the one I know best, the one from my earliest memories, has no glowing colours and now beautifully rounded story arc. It’s deliberately rough and deliberately awkward. It’s drawn with attention to detail, masterful skill, and a loving respect for each figure in the book, each character, each article of clothing. And these figures are often a bit ugly, the clothing ill-fitting, everything feeling somewhat exaggerated, a bit of a caricature, the oddity capturing, underneath, a deeper truth.

The book is Hanukah Money by Sholem Aleichem, the art by Uri Shulevitz deftly leaping to catch the meaning of each word, draw it forth in sepia tones, and highlight how, in this story, this book, this scene from the Old Country is gone. It was once, perhaps, a reality, though the deliberately folktale like character of the book casts it into fiction. Once, people lived in shtetls; it was a product of injustice but it was a way of life for many Jews. That ended. It was another injustice. And, after the Shoah, through which Uri Shulevitz lived, well. The people were murdered, the way of life they led was gone.

The folktale quality, the fiction, the funniness, all carries a terrific pathos, a massive discomfort which bothered me terribly as a child, because I sensed something was wrong. If you’d asked me, I probably would have said that it wasn’t pretty.

No, it’s not pretty. Because it’s beautiful. It’s full of odd and funny uglinesses, and it’s art of the very highest register.

What a bizarre combination. How astonishingly strange, a beautiful book of awkwardly unattractive bits and bobs and people! But what comes through in this pathos, this sadness, is love and celebration. Uri Shulevitz is honouring these beautifully odd people who led such hard lives in such an unjust world which gave them so few chances. He takes that folkloric quality and with tender respect renders each person with careful humour, a delicate fineness of lines and shading. The children are handled with particular fondness, but the funny little scene when Aunt Pessl calls to deaf Uncle Moishe-Aaron captures so much in one page that I feel a little smile creep over me every time I look at it. How often has that wife yelled to that husband, barely a foot away? How often has he grumbled? How often have those kids looked on, thinking nothing of it, really, just waiting for some Hanukah money?

What comes through is a very deep sense of honesty, of artistic truth and integrity, and of dedication to giving life to this bygone world, cruelly robbed of life. When you look at Uncle Moishe-Aaron, he is wearing ripped and torn clothes, carefully patched, in a ripped and torn world, carefully restored in these pages.

The world, now, feels ripped and torn to me. There’s a gigantic, gaping hole where Uri Shulevitz was. His work is monumental, but when you look at it, so much of it feels like these moments in Hanukah Money: small moments, odd people, treated with gentleness and respect. The Fool of the World is a strange boy, and his parents barely notice his going. But Uri Shulevitz dismisses the brilliant older brothers as they walk right out of the fairy tale, and, per fairy tale tradition, we walk with the last and the least. But something struck me, in reading it to my Spriggan: the music. The Fool of the World is always singing. We sing with the Fool of the World, and the art sings, too.

The world is ripped and torn. We Fools of the World can be odd and imperfect, awkward and ill-fitting. But Uri Shulevitz taught us to honour even the uglies, even our last and least with deftness and care, with attention to detail, with loving lines and respect for each patch on a worn out coat. We may be hurt, but we should find our companions and sing together. Put a map on the wall and dream of difference, of possibility, and of each other, with singing colours and harmonized oddities.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking that the loss of Uri Shulevitz is a gap in the world. One more gap in a list that feels far, far too long by now: Lore Segal, Tomie De Paola, Eric Carle, Kazuo Iwamura, Ashley Bryan, Lois Ehlert, Jerry Pinkney… I am struck by how many names come to me so very quickly, each a very keen pain. But I am grateful for what Uri Shulevitz gave us through his life and his years of dedicated work: beautiful art, respect for those who were diminished, and honest love for even the last and the least. Let us not forget that he chose to create his exquisite work for children. Let’s carry on doing just that: giving only the best and the most brilliant art to our children.

I think most of those who read my words here are Canadian or American, and I wonder… Have you heard of Kazuo Iwamura? The two countries where I met his books were not on this continent; I met him in France and in Israel. I fell in love with the kind of precipitousness one associates with romantic comedies, but to me evokes the openheartedness of children. He caught me right in the raw heart of my childhood delight in watching squirrels and mice. Beatrix Potter, Jill Barklem, Leo Lionni all understand this, and so did Kazuo Iwamura.

So when I saw an announcement through Librairie nordest, one of my favourite book shops in Paris, that Kazuo Iwamura had died on December 19, 2024, I cried, and then I looked around and was astonished to see that few people on my continent seemed to have noticed. And I thought for a second and realized that I’d gathered his books in French for my French storytime (I read to little kids at my local public library once a month and it is my absolute favourite time I spend do anything for kids who aren’t mine), but getting them in English had always been a little harder. (Many of his books, but not all, have been produced in English by NorthSouth, distributed by Simon and Schuster.)

So I feel like it rests with me to share a bit about the wonders of his books and try to encourage you to find a few, in French or English or Japanese or any language at all, really, to read to yourself or with a child. I like the English and French translations, both, though the French voice comes through with a particular pep and vigour, so I think he must have had a particularly excellent translator there. Truly, though, the engagement of the art, which is of such a breathtakingly beautiful quality, is so high, that the words serve as a guide to the art, like one of the rope ladders or pulleys that his little mice use to climb up to the treetops for a lunar picnic one night of the year. You can reach that lovely meal in the moonlight regardless, but it’s very nice to have the words to guide you there.

What is a Kazuo Iwamura book like? One of the ones I’ve read most often, both to the children at the library and to my own little Spriggan at home (he doesn’t know French but loves being read to in French), is L’Hiver de la famille souris (The Mouse Family in Winter). Has it been translated into English, too? I actually haven’t checked. I wonder if a British publisher may have done these. But the first view of the mouse family is not outside, and not in the snow. They’re cozy at home, making things. Some are cooking, others are woodworking, the little ones are playing or helping in those ways that small children play or help in the “getting under everyone else’s feet” method. It’s delightfully real. And after everyone enjoys a snack and a game they go outside. They play in the snow, the adults as well as the children. Then they go home.

That is it.

The environment, the atmosphere, the full family involvement and engagement, are all exquisite. There’s a sense of tranquility and a sense of mischief. There’s a bit of bickering. There are mishaps. They’re all in the context of generally good-natured interactions, and they aren’t reported immersively. That is: you certainly get dialogue, but the effect is at a distance, like watching a slowly developing fresco on a long passageway, as the mice go along from moment to moment and you’re walking along the mural, watching their day unfold before your eyes. The immersiveness isn’t in the characters but in the entire scenario, the landscape and the world.

This is how his forest resembles Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge or the Lake District in Beatrix Potter’s stories.

I find enormous comfort and huge joy in flipping through his scenes, and thinking that there was a man in this world who threw himself into art this beautiful and of such a high level for the sake of children. He built a museum for children and picture book art, too, the Kazuo Iwamura Picture Book Museum of the Hill in Nasu-Karasuyama. I can only imagine its beauty, because anyone who spent his time putting such tender care into the art he made for children must have created a museum with equivalent dedication and attention. I want to leave you with a quote from a recent interview he had with NorthSouth Books: “I’m convinced that it’s really essential for children not only to have top class picture books but also to become familiar with the real world of nature.” Thank you, Kazuo Iwamura, for giving children the top of the top class in picture books, and ones that are a window onto nature, and surely make them wish to go out and see it and feel it with all their senses. I will visit you in your books.

I was about to begin this post “I think that you’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard of Jon Klassen’s new board book series,” and then I paused. I reflected. I think that sentence says everything you need to know about me. If I’ve learned one thing in my years on this planet, it’s that, inexplicably, people don’t pay attention to children, and to things pertaining to children. I find this infuriating. So, while I was thinking, “Oh, everyone out there knows that Jon Klassen has made a board book series, I’m sure,” it turns out that, as a matter of fact, that assumption was incorrect. I am here to correct this problem. Please meet: Your Farm, Your Island, and Your Forest. The very titles, to me, gently but very definitively orient the books and the read-aloud scenario around the child.

I do not normally think of Jon Klassen and “inexorable” in the same sentence (I have not met him, alas, but he seems gentle and lovely), but he inexorably leads the reader to put the child first, and allows the child to play in these worlds as the prime mover of their own space. It seems (based on, I want to say, if I remember correctly, some Instagram posts on the Candlewick account, but you’ll have to dig it up yourself) that he was inspired in making these by felt books where you could arrange shapes to create scenes and stories. Not only did he have these growing up, but his mother has these sets (designed by him, made by her, I believe) for sale, because an insanely talented creator like that clearly gets his skills from somewhere! Jon Klassen’s mother seems amazing, I’m just saying.

You can easily imagine, looking at those simple, cleanly designed shapes, moved around and organized neatly on the page (each shape is introduced on the right side of each spread, then tidily placed on the left), a child picking up a tree or a rock and placing it somewhere. As an adult, you beam inside thinking how nicely behaved that child is. Then, reflecting for a minute, you probably acknowledge that at the end of the game it’s all going to get thrown in the air and the pieces will be scattered. A cat might chew on one of the felt shapes. But this? This is a board book. It stays put. It is calm, it is organized. And the gentle amusement, the chuckles we get from those shifting eyes, all come to a close with the beautiful rising moon, making these ideal sleepy-time books.

The loveliness of the atmosphere calls to mind Taro Gomi’s gorgeously balanced, occasionally mischievous board books. One of my favourites is Little Chicks in which the chicks run and move and– whoops, there’s someone to avoid!– until they’re safely all the way home. There’s a quietness, an atmosphere that rounds out the “start, middle, end” structure rather than relying on an overly engineered plot or a scene squashed helter-skelter into cardboard pages. Well, that comparison is clearly not by happenstance because in the NYT piece I linked above, but am linking to again because it’s better worth reading than this but not as well worth reading as the board books themselves, Jon Klassen cites two board book influences: Taro Gomi and Sandra Boynton. (Sandra Boynton: if you’re reading this, send me a note, because I have so many questions for you about The Going to Bed Book, a work of literary genius.)

If you’re a board book connoisseur, you will instantly be intrigued because those two are very different one from the other. You will also be impressed, because they are, simply and bluntly put, the best creators at this format.

Board books are hard. I will up and say right now that even Jon Klassen (and I love Jon Klassen and am angry he’s not yet received the Nobel Prize for Literature) did not get himself added to Sandra Boynton and Taro Gomi as “the best at this format” in my personal pantheon. He’s pretty damned close, though, because his method in this series and his approach to the format as a whole are both brilliant. He centres the child and forces the reader to accord the child the attention and agency of building a world. The feeling of reading these with a child on your lap is perfect love. Further, he gives a span to the book not by cramming a plot that’s too big and unwieldy for a board book (a common error) into the cardboard pages, but by giving each the natural arc of a day. Simple, natural. The absolute best of the trio, to my mind, is Your Forest because of the ghost. My co-reader adored that ghost and was so satisfied the ghost came out at night as promised. Every book creator should keep promises with the attention of Jon Klassen.

And why does he do that? Because Jon Klassen respects his readers, these small ones as well as the older child. I love these books, and I think he even has room to grow as a board book creator if he has a mind to. And one thing that satisfies me in my deepest heart, the soul of my soul, is that I know that if he doesn’t think he’s got another board book to share, Jon Klassen will not squeeze one out. Like that felt book above, like the places he hands to the smallest children for them, like the bear seeking his hat– Jon Klassen takes the quality of what he produces seriously.

He admires the witchery of Sandra Boynton; I admire the craftsmanship of Jon Klassen. And both of those creators admire and attend to the genuine readership of their non-reader audiences. They respect babies, toddlers, and children. I think we all should.

I have a lot of thoughts about the past few years in picture books, in particular, as well as children’s literature overall. Some of it is very cranky, and can be broadly but mostly accurately summed up in the following wish for publishing: Publish fewer books, but spend more time on bringing each to its own best self. On the other hand, I feel powerful excitement about those books I particularly love. I hope this list will not just be a one person Mock Caldecott, but also a chance to choose some particularly good books as, for example, gifts, or even ideas for what to buy with that gift certificate you got, so I’ll add up front that this is only for 2024. Other books I’m giving as gifts include Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, Nevermoor by Jessica Townsend, anything and everything by Grace Lin and Sy Montgomery, and so much more. The thing about books is they don’t often expire and they can be read more than once.

I think Tumblebaby by Adam Rex and Audrey Helen Weber might have won my Caldecott this year. Beautiful, clever, it’s a kind of Wild West In the Night Kitchen. Bracketed by the fundamental love of parents (only partly seen) for their new baby, Tumblebaby tumbles through the world, surrounded by chaos but the imperturbable, happily sleeping Tumblebaby simply tumbles through, an island of smiling snoozing calm, until Tumblebaby tumbles back home in the end. Yes, yes, there are coyotes. Yes, yes, there are bandits. Easily shocked parents will be scared, I’m sure, but this is an absolutely delightful read-aloud, and the refrains have been living in my head, occasionally making my toes tap as I murmur to myself: “Tumblebaby hi, Tumblebaby ho, Tumblebaby fly down the driveway and go…”

For a perfectly delightful, perfectly delicious read-aloud that will somehow make your room feel cozy, wood-panelled, with a big fireplace and deep chairs, each with a wool blanket on it… Look, I think that even if you’re in a corporate boardroom, the magic would still work for this one: Santa’s First Christmas by Mac Barnett and Sydney Smith is less a story and more a sensory experience. I love the entire premise– the elves make Santa take a day off and celebrate Christmas– but in anyone else’s hands it would have run a very strong risk of becoming arch and oh-so-funny or gooey and saccharine. Only Mac Barnett and Sydney Smith, I think, could have approached it logically, matter-of-factly, and with a warmth and kindness that gave the Christmas feast savoury smells, rich flavours, and both sugar and spice in the desserts. Enjoy this book; there’s nothing quite like it.

I have two books illustrated by Felicita Sala on this list, and I want to assure you this is not part of some nefarious plot to have the world taken over by Felicita Sala; this is a one-woman enterprise, so any plots are only with myself.

Written and illustrated by Felicita Sala, If You Run Out of Words is yet another fun book to read aloud– this one I’ve tested on groups with great success, but my absolute preference is to read it as the last book before bedtime to a small, cozy child on my knee, whispering the last few words with my cheek pressed against his hair and bringing everything down to a warm hug, a kiss, and transferring him from my knees to his bed. Parents will be pleased with a story about reassuring a child that in a busy world of adults talking to each other on the phone, in person, texting, communicating all the time– no, they will never run out of words for their children. Children, well. A parable: I have a Spriggan in my house who, when he needs me, will ask for “a Once Upon a Time.” And if he’s upset, concerned, or nervous, I will pull him to me and say, “Once upon a time…” and he turns his face up, eager for the story. Children, then, will simply recognize this is another form of that, an “and then what happens, what happens next?” situation. They will love the oddity and adventure.

The other book illustrated by Felicita Sala is written by Mary Lyn Ray, When You Find the Right Rock. I’m impressed by the perfect pairing of artist to text. So, what is it about kids and rocks, by the way? Remember Alfie finding his Bonting, that one rock that fits so perfectly in his hand? And, Canadians, have you seen The Rock Box from Running the Goat? Kids love rocks. And, somehow, they know when a rock is their rock, the rock they connect to. Perhaps an adult looks and says, “That sure is a rock, yes. Um, can we leave it at the park?” Do not try this, I do not recommend it. I have personally experienced the storm of tears, the despair, and the fury of a child told that maybe we should leave the rock outside. Mary Lyn Ray and Felicita Sala get it. And, honestly, at age 37, I’m starting, maybe, to get it, too. Maybe I haven’t found the right rock for myself, but I look at kids holding a rock, and turning it over, or climbing and sitting on a rock, and I just have to smile. They’re warm young things right there with the bones of the earth, after all. Also, Felicita Sala’s art– I know I haven’t said much about it, I’ve focused on the text in these two books. She can make me see the soul of a rock.

As soon as I saw Kevin and the Blackbirds by David Almond and P.J. Lynch on the Candlewick list, I went for it– well, to be honest I was so excited I clicked too hard in the wrong place and closed the open window and had a brief moment of panic that I’d never get the book now, which is simply not how any of this works. What’s most to love? David Almond is one of my favourite writers for children. He trusts them as readers. One of my favourite books of the 21st century so far is The Woman Who Turned Children Into Birds, and the idea of a story based on the Life of St. Kevin by him, with art by one of the greatest illustrators working today, P.J. Lynch, was thrilling. The story is tender in itself and deeply human. The story is old and very specific to a specific person and place and time. Through that specificity, it somehow encompasses a compassion and love for the world, each other, and for all life which enriches us all. Also, it made me dig up the Latin Vita Sancti Coemgeni because I was eager to see where it came from.

I have been a fan of Akiko Miyakoshi since… Well, this review of The Tea Party in the Woods was published on February 19, 2016. That was a while ago, wasn’t it? I think her mastery of her own form has only improved, and Little Shrew is an absolute exemplification of what Alan Garner talks of when he says the advice he received from his grandfather was never to do what the other feller could do. Only Akiko Miyakoshi could have looked at a shrew and spun this series of stories, so truthful, so humane, and so patently, so obviously, not about a human, but about a shrew. The logic of each story is perfect, internal to the book, and her art is so exquisite I fell in love with her tiny shrew with the successfully solved Rubik’s Cube. The lines capture both texture and love. Akiko Miyakoshi loves her shrew, we can tell, and so do we.

Sally Nicholls is an exciting new discovery for me. Her retelling of Godfather Death with art by Júlia Sardà is reminiscent of the best kind of storytelling, it has personal voice and character, and is absolutely uncompromising. You can’t have a story like Godfather Death, an old folktale of the most exploratory kind, the type where you feel the storyteller puzzling through every question people have asked about injustice, death, poverty, and human suffering. It has a sardonic side, but it’s not cynical. It has a rough and biting edge, but it’s full of pain and sympathy. And, against all odds, it has great warmth and humour alongside the sadness. The art by Júlia Sardà is utterly perfect: it recalls to me Mary Azarian, Wanda Gág, and Barbara Cooney, but the painterliness is entirely Júlia Sardà.

As if this weren’t already enough, I have already reviewed Tove and the Island with No Address, Emma Full of Wonders, and Round and Round the Year We Go and those links will bring you right back to the reasons why they’re good, but don’t you just trust me by now? That should all give you plenty to work with for the time being, so, in the words of Nanty Solo: Go on! Be happy. Off you fly.