The best picture books parents will also love

I love this book as a parent because it is a joy to read. Its rhyme is sheer perfection (which is hard to pull off) and the conclusion is pure genius, as Hoberman deftly weaves a tapestry out of seemingly random strings. This is a hilarious book about a mother who grows more and more weary from the demands of her seven children and their very particular and fussy eating habits. This kitchen-bound, short-order-chef hero of a mom gets a lovely surprise at the end that makes all the chaos seem worth it. Kids will giggle, moms (or dads or other caregivers) will relate.

This is another fave of mine because the protagonist is a boy who collects words (rather than stamps or baseball cards). He saves the words he’s learned in a scrapbook until one day, he trips and his words go flying into the air and land in a jumble on the floor. What he discovers are odd and interesting pairings of words he wouldn’t have thought go together. The result is poetic. Finally, he takes a big sack of words to the top of a hill and scatters them into the wind so other kids will make their own connections. This book is fantastic for kids and adults who love words.

Parents will enjoy this funny book about a packet of crayons going on strike. Red feels overworked, Black doesn’t want to simply be used for outlining anymore, and Yellow and Orange are having a disagreement over which of them is the real color of the sun. They need Duncan to sort this all out. Illustrated in a unique style as handwritten letters, parents and kids will find the story humorous and the illustrations original.

This time Oliver Jeffers shows that he is not only a fantastic illustrator (see above) but a storyteller in his own right. Once again the pictures say so much more than the words alone could convey as the boy who eats books learns that reading them is so much better. However, the bite taken out of the last page cleverly shows that sometimes he slips up. And parents are not to worry, because there is a disclaimer on the back cover warning to kids to “please do not try to eat this book at home”!

Any impatient adult or child will tell you that waiting is indeed not for the faint of heart. In this book, which is a part of the early reader Elephant and Piggie series, Piggie has a surprise for Gerald the Elephant. But he must wait for it, and wait and wait and wait. As he waits, Gerald’s groans grow louder, illustrated typographically with ever-enlarging speech bubbles. The ending shows previously frustrated Gerald the Elephant proclaiming that the surprise was well worth the wait. And indeed it is!!