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2017’s Best Book Lists for Kids and Teens

Published on December 21, 2017 | In Blog, Recommended Books | 0 Comment

We’ve gathered a list of the more prominent best-of-the-year lists for children’s and YA books published in 2017. from Publishers Weekly, posted on Dec 21, 2017

Publishers Weekly’s Best Children’s Books of 2017: Curated from reviews of nearly 2,000 children’s and young adult books published this year, these were our selections for the top 50 books of the year for readers of all ages and interests.

The 2017 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature: This year’s medalist was Robin Benway for her novel Far From the Tree (HarperTeen).

The New York Times’s Notable Children’s Books of 2017: Selected by the children’s books editor of the New York Times.

The New York Times Best Illustrated Book Award for 2017: Every year, the Times gathers an independent panel of judges to select a list of the top 10 picture books based on artistic merit. This marked the first year the prize was issued jointly with the New York Public Library.

School Library Journal: The SLJ review editors’ top 2017 books, apps, audiobooks, and more.

Kirkus's Best of 2017: The year's best picture books, middle grade, and teen fiction and nonfiction, chosen by the Kirkus editors.

Booklist’s 2017 Top of the List: The editors share their picks in categories including youth picture book, youth fiction, and youth audio.

The Horn Book’s Fanfare: The editors of the Horn Book present their picks for the year’s best children’s and young adult books.

Time’s Top 10 Young Adult and Children’s Books of 2017: The editors of Time share their top reads of the year.

Goodreads Choice Awards 2017: Goodreads users vote annually on their favorite books of the year, in 20 categories.

The Guardian’s best children’s books of 2017: Selected annually from books published in the U.K. by the Guardian’s children’s book editor.

The YA Book Prize, celebrates the top YA books in the U.K.

The Irish Times’s best children’s and YA books of 2017.

Quill and Quire’s 2017 kids’ and YA books of the year: Selected by the Canadian magazine’s books for young people’s editors.

The Boston Globe’s best books of 2017.

The Wall Street Journal’s Best Children’s Books of 2017.

The Washington Post’s best children’s books of 2017: The Post’s reviewers share their picks in fiction, nonfiction, and picture books.

Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best YA Books of 2017.

The New York Public Library’s Best Books for Kids and Best Books for Teens.

Bank Street’s Best Children’s Books of the Year: Selected by the children’s book committee at Bank Street College of Education.

Barnes & Noble’s Best Young Adult Books of 2017: The B&N Teen Blog shares its picks for the year’s top 25 YA books.

Amazon’s Best Children’s Books of 2017: Amazon editors select their top picks in categories for all ages.

The Best Children’s Books of 2017, According to Kids: Brightly gathers the top-rated kids’ books on Bookopolis.

The Best YA Books of 2017, According to Teens: The top-rated books for teens on Bookopolis.

The Seven Loveliest Children’s Books of 2017: Brain Pickings shares its selections for the most “profound and poetic” children’s books published or republished in 2017.

BookPage’s Best Children’s and Teen Books 2017: The BookPage staff selects 10 favorite titles in three categories: picture books, middle grade, and YA.

A Mighty Girl’s 2017 Books of the Year: The year’s best books starring girls and women for readers of all ages.

YALSA’s 2018 Excellence in Nonfiction Award finalists: The award recognizes the best nonfiction book published for young adults, ages 12 through 18.

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27. Beloved Children’s Book Author and Illustrator Leo Lionni on Creativity and the Secret of Great Storytelling

Published on December 20, 2017 | In Blog, How To Begin Writing For Children, Recommended Books | 0 Comment

“What we create … we fill in with our own thoughts and feelings.”

By Maria Popova, in BrainPickings

In 1959, beloved children’s book author and illustrator Leo Lionni(May 5, 1910–October 11, 1999) created a lovely little book for his grandkids, Pippo and Annie. Little Blue and Little Yellow, a minimalist and brilliant allegorical primer on color theory and graphic design basics, went on to inspire generations of children, and the process of creating it elated and energized Lionni so much that it catapulted him into a lifelong career of award-winning visual storytelling aimed at children, but bearing timeless and ageless resonance for all.

In Artist to Artist: 23 Major Illustrators Talk to Children About Their Art (public library) — the same magnificent volume that gave use Eric Carle’s, Maurice Sendak’s, and other icons’ advice to children on being an artist — Annie Lionni recounts her grandfather’s approach to the creative process and his convictions about where ideas come from:

The most frequent question that children asked my grandfather Leo was, “How do you get your ideas?” He would usually start with a simple idea. Sometimes the idea would be a beginning to a story, sometimes an ending, other times it might be the main character, or the situation. But however it would start, he would work hard to create a story from that idea. He thought of it as a game of chess, moving the pieces around to create the best story possible. And so, to the question “How do you get your ideas?” he would give a simple answer — “Hard work.”

But why did Leo make books at all? Why draw, or paint, or make sculptures out of wood, glass or metal? He did all of those things and more. He always said that he had “an irresistible urge to make things.” If for some reason he couldn’t make art, he claimed that he’d make bricks or boxes or anything else that he could make with his hands.

Above all, however, Lionni’s magic came from his full immersion in the stories, his complete identification with his characters: Annie writes:

Leo would quote a book that he read years ago — “When a painter paints a tree, he becomes a tree.” What we create, he believed, we fill in with our own thoughts and feelings. That’s why even the inanimate things in his books have human qualities — the walls, plants and stones might be humorous or stern or anything else that people can be.

But when Leo said he became a tree, he also thought that the tree became him. “Of course, I am Frederick,” he said, referring to one of my favorite characters, Frederick the Mouse. And he was Swimmy when he became the eye of the giant fish. All of his characters were part of his own self, and he thought that was probably true for every children’s book author.

Artist to Artist is absolutely wonderful from cover to cover, doubly so for the fact that all proceeds from the book benefit the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

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The 7 Loveliest Children’s Books of 2017 from BrainPickings

Published on December 20, 2017 | In Blog, Recommended Books | 0 Comment

Profound and poetic illustrated celebrations of solitude, self-possession, friendship, and our place in the cosmos. By Maria Popova

“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,”Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White asserted. “You have to write up, not down.” A generation later, Maurice Sendak scoffed in his final interview: “I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” Indeed, great children’s books — the timeless kind, which lodge themselves in the marrow of one’s being and seed into the young psyche ideas that bloom again and again throughout a lifetime — radiate a beauty and profundity transcending age. They are books for all of us and for all time.

Here are seven such books published or republished in 2017, to complement the year’s great science books.

BIG WOLF & LITTLE WOLF

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. There is a strange and sorrowful loneliness to this, to being a creature that carries its fragile sense of self in a bag of skin on an endless pilgrimage to some promised land of belonging. We are willing to erect many defenses to hedge against that loneliness and fortress our fragility. But every once in a while, we encounter another such creature who reminds us with the sweetness of persistent yet undemanding affection that we need not walk alone.

Such a reminder radiates with uncommon tenderness from Big Wolf & Little Wolf (public library) by French author Nadine Brun-Cosme and illustrator Olivier Tallec, originally published in 2009 and reissued in 2017. With great subtlety and sensitivity, the story invites a meditation on loneliness, the meaning of solidarity, the relationship between the ego and the capacity for love, and the little tendrils of care that become the armature of friendship. ....

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees,” William Blake wrote in his spectacular 1799 defense of the imagination. More than a century and a half later, illustrator and designer Jacqueline Ayer (May 2, 1930–May 20, 2012) offered a beautiful allegorical counterpart to Blake’s timeless message in her 1962 masterpiece The Paper-Flower Tree (public library) — a warm and whimsically illustrated parable about the moral courage of withstanding cynicism and the generative power of the affectionate imagination.

The Paper-Flower Tree, originally published in 1962 and now lovingly resurrected by my friends of Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse Enchanted Lion, is one of four books about Thailand Ayer wrote and illustrated, like Tolkien’s Mr. Bliss, for her own children.

It tells the story of a little girl named Miss Moon, who lives under “the enormous blue sky” of rural Thailand and wanders the horizonless rice fields with her baby brother. ....

Generations of great thinkers have extolled the creative purpose of boredom. Long before psychologists came to understand why “fertile solitude” is the seedbed of a full life, Bertrand Russell pointed to what he called “fruitful monotony” as central to the conquest of happiness. “There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” wrote the poet May Sarton in her stunning 1938 ode to solitude. But today the fertile sanctuary of solitude is a place more endangered than any other locus of the spirit, attesting more acutely than ever to Blaise Pascal’s seventeenth-century assertion that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Now comes a warm and wondrous invitation to remastering the art of fertile solitude in On a Magical Do-Nothing Day (public library) by Italian artist and author Béatrice Alemagna, translated by Jill Davis.

The lyrical, tenderly illustrated story is told in the voice of an androgynous young protagonist who grudgingly accompanies Mom to a writing cabin in the lush, rainy woods — a place oozing boredom only alleviated by a videogame.

Eventually, concerned that this will be “another day of doing nothing,” Mom commands a break from the screen. She confiscates the game and hides it, “as usual,” only to have her discontented child find it, “as usual,” and rush outside in a bright orange raincoat, game tightly clutched as some kind of protective amulet against “this boring, wet place.”....

Since long before researchers began to illuminate the astonishing science of what trees feel and how they communicate, the human imagination has communed with the arboreal world and found in it a boundless universe of kinship. A seventeenth-century gardener wrote of how trees “speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons.” Hermann Hesse called them “the most penetrating of preachers.” They continue to furnish our lushest metaphors for life and death.

Crowning the canon of arboreal allegories is Bertolt (public library) by French-Canadian geologist-turned-artist Jacques Goldstyn — the uncommonly tender story of an ancient tree named Bertolt and the boy who named and loved it. From Goldstyn’s simple words and the free, alive, infinitely expressive line of his illustrations radiates a profound parable of belonging, reconciling love and loss, and savoring solitude without suffering loneliness.

The story, told in the little boy’s voice, begins with the seeming mundanity of a lost mitten, out of which springs everything that is strange and wonderful about the young protagonist. ....

He observes that while it is unambiguous when a pet has died, a tree “stands there like a huge boney creature that’s sleeping or playing tricks on us.” If Bertolt had been struck by lightning or chopped off, the boy would have understood. But that a loss so profound can be so undramatic, so uneventful, seems barely comprehensible.

It is this penetrating aspect of the book that places it among the greatest children’s books about processing the subtleties of loss. ....

When the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its camera back on the Solar System for one last look after taking its pioneering photographs of our planetary neighborhood, it captured a now-iconic image of Earth — a tiny pixel in a tiny slice of an incomprehensibly vast universe. The photograph was christened the “Pale Blue Dot” thanks to Carl Sagan, who immortalized the moment in his timeless monologue on our place in the cosmos:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Forty years after the Voyager sailed into space, we seem to have lost sight of this beautiful and sobering perspective, drifting further and further into our divides, fragmenting our fragile home pixel into more and more warring factions, and forgetting that we are bound together by the improbable miracle of life on this Pale Blue Dot and a shared cosmic destiny.

A mighty antidote to this civilizational impoverishment of imagination comes from Oliver Jeffers, one of the great visual storytellers of our time, in Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth (public library) — Jeffers’s most personal picture-book yet, dedicated to his firstborn child. (The subtitle, Jeffers said, was inspired by The Universe in Verse, which he attended with his own father.) With expressive illustrations and spare, warm words, Jeffers extends an invitation to all humans, new and old, to fathom the beautiful unity of beings, so gloriously different, orbiting a shared Sun on a common cosmic voyage. ....

“The dark body of the Moon gradually steals its silent way across the brilliant Sun,” Mabel Loomis Todd wrote in her poetic nineteenth-century masterpiece on the surreal splendor of a total solar eclipse. Nearly a century earlier, in his taxonomy of the three layers of reality, John Keats listed among “things real” the “existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakespeare.” Indeed, the motions of the heavenly bodies precipitated the Scientific Revolution that strengthened humanity’s grasp of reality by dethroning us from the center of the universe. But, paradoxically, the Sun and the Moon belong equally with the world of Shakespeare, with humanity’s most enduring storytelling — they are central to our earliest sky myths in nearly every folkloric tradition, radiating timeless stories and parables that give shape to the human experience through imaginative allegory.

In Sun and Moon (public library), ten Indian folk and tribal artists bring to life the solar and lunar myths of their indigenous traditions in stunningly illustrated stories reflecting on the universal themes of life, love, time, harmony, and our eternal search for a completeness of being. ....

This uncommon hand-bound treasure of a book, silkscreened on handmade paper with traditional Indian dyes, comes from South Indian independent publisher Tara Books, who for the past decades have been giving voice to marginalized art and literature through a commune of artists, writers, and designers collaborating on books handcrafted by local artisans in a fair-trade workshop in Chennai, producing such treasures as The Night Life of Trees, Drawing from the City, Creation, and Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit. ....

“This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?” young Tolstoy wrote in his diary. A generation later on the other side of the Atlantic, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell wrote in hers as she contemplated the art of knowing what to do with one’s life: “To know what one ought to do is certainly the hardest thing in life. ‘Doing’ is comparatively easy.”

How we arrive at that secret and sacred knowledge is what Brooklyn-based artist Vern Kousky explores in The Blue Songbird (public library) — a lyrical and tenderhearted parable about finding one’s voice and coming home to oneself. With its soft watercolors and mellifluous prose composed of simple words, Kousky’s story emanates a Japanese aesthetic of thought and vision, where great truths are surfaced with great gentleness and simplicity.

We meet a a young blue songbird on a golden island, who listens to her sisters’ beautiful songs each morning. Unable to sing like they sing, she anguishes that there seem to be no songs for her in the world.

Her wise and loving mother counsels the blue songbird to “go and find a special song” that she alone can sing. ....

For the complete text and illustrations in this amazing article, go to Maria Popova's website at https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/17/best-childrens-books-2017/

Step into the cultural time machine with selections for the loveliest children’s books of 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.

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Abrams Partners with the Met on Line of Kids’ Books

Published on December 20, 2017 | In Blog, News, Recommended Books | 0 Comment

By Emma Kantor, Dec 19, 2017, for Publishers Weekly

Abrams Children’s Books has announced an exclusive partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Store on a new publishing program, launching in March 2018. The books will pull from the Met’s collection, covering art concepts, history and biography, and content tied to the museum’s exhibitions.

Howard Reeves, editor-at-large at Abrams, and Elizabeth Stoneman, senior manager of merchandising partnerships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, negotiated the partnership. Reeves will oversee the editorial program, which will publish four to six new titles per year.

The program’s launch title is World Make Way: New Poems Inspired by Art from the Metropolitan Museum, a poetry anthology featuring works from the museum, with an introduction by Lee Bennett Hopkins. Also included in the 2018 list is I Love Art, an illustrated introduction to the Met collection.

In a statement, Richard Pedott, v-p of merchandising at the Met, said, “These new titles will introduce children to a diverse range of art and artists from around the globe. Our hope is to delight and inspire a new generation of artists and thinkers, which is central to the Museum’s mission.”

Andrew Smith, senior v-p and publisher of Abrams Children’s Books, said in a statement, “The Met’s celebrated art collection combined with Abrams’s distinguished history as a visual publisher makes this an especially auspicious partnership. Now more than ever, engagement in the arts is essential to today’s young people. This publishing program helps ensure that today’s young readers can gain critical exposure to art, artists, and cultures from around the world.”

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“An engaging guide that offers a valuable rewards solution for frazzled moms and dads.”

Published on December 18, 2017 | In Blog, For Parents and Teachers, Recommended Books | 0 Comment

by Virginia Shiller Meg F. Schneider illustrated by Bonnie Matthews

starred KIRKUS REVIEW

A debut manual addresses many problems in parenting with a dash of fun and plenty of advice.

“He started it.” “Can you read one more story?” “I’ll do it later.” From early toddlerhood on, it seems to many a harried parent that the child-rearing path is littered with a litany of endless complaints followed by seat-of-the-pants deal-making. Tired moms and dads just might give in to expert cajoling from young ones or, worse, bribe them for more desirable outcomes. As Shiller (Child Study Center/Yale Univ.) shows in her book, there’s a savvier method of approaching standard-issue parenting troubles: the rewards plan. While many readers may have seen a generalized version of “sticker charts,” Shiller, ably assisted by Schneider, delves deeply into the subject, first by assuring the worried parent that a rewards plan is not a bribe and that kids who follow such strategies do not grow up expecting prizes for every task when they get older. The volume, with illustrations by Matthews, discusses various probable situations in detail and with good humor. What if daily hygiene is a battle? A kid who loves gymnastics could earn stickers toward lessons, for example. To encourage a child to follow bedtime rules, his mother could offer a trip to an amusement park if he earns 55 check marks on the Keeping Track charts in the next month. The key is to bargain during downtime and not when everyone’s nerves are frayed (“Wait for a calm moment. Don’t offer a reward while the hysteria is in full flower”). Although Shiller encourages dialogue, she points out that there are ways to make sure that kids don’t ask for Nintendo systems every week they make their beds. How? Negotiate. Parents of older children should especially appreciate how the same system can be used for their situations—say, when sleepovers become difficult to execute. The book includes a variety of pullout charts (Zoo, Treasure Hunt, Dinosaur Land) that can be colored in right away and examples of stickers to use when a kid slips up and makes a mistake. A cleareyed and informative look at the trials of parenting, this readable book presents one solution customized for a bevy of situations, providing a template to tackle practically every challenge through this new lens.

An engaging guide that offers a valuable rewards solution for frazzled moms and dads.

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19. Read Recommended Picture Books 2017 from The Horn Book Herald

Published on December 13, 2017 | In Blog, For Parents and Teachers, How To Begin Writing For Children, Recommended Books | 0 Comment

December 2017 Horn Book Herald: Picture Books Edition

December 12, 2017 by Horn Book

Welcome to our all-picture-books-all-the-time edition of The Horn Book Herald! In this issue you’ll find five questions for Julia Denos and E. B. Goodale (the team behind Windows, a 2017 Horn Book Fanfare selection); posts from our Calling Caldecott blog; lists of recommended holiday books; ideas for Family Reading; our thoughts about what makes a […]

December 2017 Picture Books Horn Book Herald: More recommended reading

December 12, 2017 by Horn Book

• Fanfare: The Horn Book’s choices for the best books of 2017 • 2017 Boston Globe–Horn Book Picture Book Award winner and honor books • The New York Times Best Illustrated List • “Why the Hell Hasn’t Photography Won the Caldecott?!?” • Julie Danielson on running mock Caldecotts • “Calling CaldeNott”: Thom Barthelmess on extraordinary […]

December 2017 Picture Books Horn Book Herald: Calling Caldecott’s latest contenders

December 12, 2017 by Horn Book

Begun in 2011, The Horn Book’s Calling Caldecott blog asks: What can win? What will win? What should win? Here are some of our favorite recent posts. • Roger Sutton on The Little Red Cat Who Ran Away and Learned His ABC’s (the Hard Way) by Patrick McDonnell • Tarie Sabido on How It Feels […]

Five questions for Julia Denos and E. B. Goodale

December 12, 2017 by Katie Bircher

Julia Denos and E. B. Goodale have been friends and creative collaborators since their days working together at a children’s bookstore — where I was lucky to work with them. I’ve always admired their individual projects, and it was a pleasure to chat with them about their collaboration (and one of my favorite picture books […]

Holiday High Notes 2017

November 30, 2017 by Horn Book

We have a little section of books this time of year. They’re new (and some reissued), and filled with winter cheer. Nutcracked by Susan Adrian Intermediate Random 234 pp. 9/17 978-0-399-55668-5 $16.99 Library ed. 978-0-399-55669-2 $19.99 e-book ed. 978-0-399-55670-8 $10.99 During each rehearsal for her role as Clara in The Nutcracker, Georgie finds herself — […]

Books mentioned in the December 2016 issue of What Makes a Good…?

December 9, 2016 by Horn Book

What Makes a Good Picture Book? Wordless Picture Books Becker, Aaron Return Gr. K–3 40 pp. Candlewick 2016 ISBN 978-0-7636-7730-5 Boyd, Lizi Flashlight Preschool 40 pp. Chronicle 2014 ISBN 978-1-4521-1894-9 Cole, Henry Spot, the Cat Gr. K–3 32 pp. Little Simon 2016 ISBN 978-1-4814-4225-1 Ebook ISBN 978-1-4814-4226-8 Idle, Molly Flora and […]

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A New, Interactive Series for Babies and Toddlers from Scholastic

Published on November 26, 2017 | In Blog, For Parents and Teachers, Recommended Books | 0 Comment

The Children’s Book Review | November 19, 2017

Scholastic’s Early Learners have done it again with their new series, First Steps, geared toward babies and toddlers. These uniquely-shaped, interactive board and foam books, that feature photos of real babies, are great learning tools for your youngsters as they begin to navigate the world of books. I have strictly reviewed these not as an educator, but as a mother of an 18-month-old toddler. If my son’s wide-eyes and giant smile was any indication of the quality of these books as soon as I opened the box, then we have some winners!

Touch and Feel: Winter

This small, board book uses real photographs of all things winter including a picture of a cup of hot chocolate, a young girl ice skating, and a baby dressed all warm for the snow. Each page not only has the noun associated with each picture, but has that extra special touch and feel aspect. As the squirrel nibbles, youngsters can touch and feel the hair of its tail, and the warm fire has a piece of orange foil that crackles as it is touched.

Ages 0-3 | Publisher: Cartwheel Books | 2017 | ISBN-13: 978-1338161458