I write books for children of all ages but I began with picture books, and they will always have a special place in my heart. I like all different types of picture books. Sometimes we read for pure entertainment, and sometimes to find out about the world, but the books on this list hit the sweet spot between the two. They are all books that will inspire further conversation and might even lead to related projects at school or home.
A must for all bug lovers (as well as those who need convincing)! This is a sweet book with a traditional feel to the illustrations, and the only rhyming book on my list. I love it because it captures a child’s perspective on the world so beautifully. It has great messages about enjoying the outside world and making a difference no matter how small you are. There are fun fact pages too about various minibeasts!
Meet Betsy Buglove in this magical picture book - a girl who LOVES bugs more than anything else in the world! In a big, bustling town lived a girl who loved bugs,
from earthworms to ladybirds, woodlice and slugs.
While spiders or ants might make some scream in fright
to her, creepy crawlies were such a delight!
If there's anything to know about Betsy Buglove, it's that, when she's around, no bug ever has to worry about getting in trouble. Betsy's not afraid of sticky goo, tangled webs, or even muddy boots, no!
I have been privileged to see a penguin chick running to its parent for a meal, a blue-footed booby couple doing a mating dance, a cheetah racing across the savannah, and a whale spouting out at sea. I am committed to do what I can to preserve natural habitats and limit the effect humans have on the environment. As a teacher, librarian, and author, I encourage and laud kids who want to protect our world. It is a joy to be involved with books that are models for enthusiastic youngsters.
Each of us who has felt the awe of being in a redwood forest will identify with the kids in this book.
Julian is less than happy about having to spend the summer with his Uncle Sibley, CEO of a big company, while his mother is doing research in China. Though he knew it is wrong, he reads his uncle's email and discovers that the company is about to cut down first-growth California redwoods. Irate about both his situation and the prospect of losing the redwoods, he and friends devise a convoluted plan to solve both.
This story shows the persistence and resolve of the kids in their concern for the environment.
Clandestine e-mail exchanges, secret trips, fake press releases, and a tree house standoff are among the clever stunts and pranks the kid heroes pull in this exciting ecological adventure. Smiley Carter is a moron and a world-class jerkA"-when Julian Carter-Li intercepts an angry e-mail message meant for his greedy, high-powered uncle, it sets him on the course to stop an environmental crime! His uncle's company plans to cut down some of the oldest and last California redwood trees, and it's up to Julian, and a ragtag group of friends, to figure out a way to stop them. This fantastic debut…
Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade
by
Kimberly Behre Kenna,
Artemis Sparke has had it with humans. She heads to the nearby salt marsh to hang out with the birds, plants, and mollusks who don't make a big deal of her stutter. The shoreline sanctuary is predictable, unlike her family and friends, and the data in her science journal proves…
My choice of books reflects a lifelong passion for literature and the natural world. I’ve always enjoyed travelling, to cities or more remote locations, learning as much as I can about the people that live there, and my first published article was about a hotel in Mali, photographed by my sister. Ten years later we published our first book, The Foraged Home. With Living Wild we wanted to look more deeply at how people lived, not just where, focussing not only on day-to-day life and their work, but their relationship with the surrounding landscape, asking big questions about our place in the world.
A gorgeous meditation on friendship, the English countryside, art, and beauty.
Two men spend the spring and summer of 1989 creating crop circles in Wiltshire, working during the ‘arcane mystery of the humming night’ to ‘fuel the myth and strive for beauty, yes, but never the reveal the truth’ of their identities. It’s lyrical and life-affirming, yes, but also a warning.
As Calvert, an ex-soldier, remarks: ‘it’s about the land...getting people to learn to love it so that they don’t take it for granted, and then feel compelled to protect it.'
Summer 1989, deep in the English countryside — during a time of mass unemployment, class war, and rebellion . . . .
Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men — Calvert, an ex-soldier traumatized by his experience in the Falklands War, and his affable freind Redbone — set out nightly in a decrepit camper van to undertake an extraordinary project.
Under cover of darkness, they traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns, painstakingly avoiding damaging the wheat to yield designs so intricate that their overnight appearances…
As a child, all I wanted to read were books about adventure. I also had an adventurous childhood, growing up in the Louisiana swamps with a father who actually hunted alligators and took me with him. As I came of age, I longed to tell stories, and, as they say, it’s best to write about what you know. To date, I’ve penned six novels, all set in the exotic wetlands of Cajun, Louisiana. I feel missionary about this—that my writing gifts allow me to decode my homeplace in a way that makes it easier for outsiders to see the singular niche it occupies on the American landscape.
What are you made of, really? Who hasn’t conjured up a survival scenario in which you are the protagonist? How would you fare?
I loved this book because the author put you on that plane in that horribly inconceivable situation in which you simply know you will likely die. But you don’t—not immediately, anyway. But then the real struggle begins. This book resonates with me because every difficult, life-changing scenario is utterly plausible, unnerving, and interesting.
This award-winning contemporary classic is the survival story with which all others are compared—and a page-turning, heart-stopping adventure, recipient of the Newbery Honor. Hatchet has also been nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
Thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson, haunted by his secret knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, is traveling by single-engine plane to visit his father for the first time since the divorce. When the plane crashes, killing the pilot, the sole survivor is Brian. He is alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but his clothing, a tattered windbreaker, and the hatchet his mother…
I was invited to travel to Africa and the Mid East on a job and I started to say, “I’m not that kind of guy.” Then I realized I am. I‘d already traveled around the world and even off it, reading. I’ve been happy and sad in books, victorious, scared, in love, survived storms and fierce wars, mourned valiant friends, and even space traveled. Books add dimension to life. What is dimension? Simply more. Like frosting on cake, hot sauce on fries, ice cubes in soda... fudge sauce on ice cream... I read daily, get great ideas and feelings from books, still make new friends asking, “Have you read this?” Well, have you?
Sometimes a book ends too soon for a reader, or in a way that doesn’t sit right. When that happened to author, Gary Paulsen, he did something about it. He extended the original Hatchet tale in a new book, Brian’s Winter, as if Brian didn’t make it out in autumn and had to winter over.
If you haven’t read Hatchet, you’re missing a wilderness treat. A real adventure, making you feel like Brian, crash-landed in northern Canada, utterly on your own with one tool. Reading the book, I admit shivering, holding my breath, feeling my hopes rise and fall with his... really not wanting to stop reading and go do my chores.
He survives with some luck, and with guts and brains. I like feeling I could be that guy.
From three-time Newbery Honor-winning author Gary Paulsen comes a beloved follow-up to his award-winning classic Hatchet that asks: What if Brian hadn't been rescued and had to face his deadliest enemy yet--winter?
In the Newbery Honor-winning Hatchet, thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson learned to survive alone in the Canadian wilderness, armed only with his hatchet. As millions of readers know, he was rescued at the end of the summer. But what if that hadn't happened? What if Brian had been left to face his deadliest enemy--winter?
Brian Paulsen raises the stakes for survival in this riveting and inspiring story as one boy…
I love books where the setting is just as big and alive as the characters. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a familiar place or someplace new: if a vivid setting is a key element of the story, I’m in. I think it’s because I grew up in one of those small towns in the beautiful middle of nowhere where if someone asks where you’re from, it’s just easier to say someplace else. I wanted to see the world, and books let me do that. I also wanted validation in reading—and writing—about the small places I knew, and books let me do that, too.
I love how this book is the perfect example of how the setting makes a story: the flooded coastal Louisiana town of Boutin, Jillian, and all its residents are the story.
If a place disappears, will its stories also disappear? Jillian doesn’t only see the seemingly inevitable problems; rather, she becomes part of the solution by taking part in ecology projects and collecting the oral histories of the town’s residents. As Jillian says, if she can’t save the land, she can save the stories.
I also love the centered and matter-of-fact way this book handles family problems. Bonus points for all the cooking and great food.
For thirteen-year-old Jillian Robichaux, three things are sacred: bayou sunsets, her grandmother Nonnie's stories, and the coastal Louisiana town of Boutin that she calls home.
When the worst flood in a century hits, Jillian and the rest of her community band together as they always do - but this time the damage may simply be too great. After the local school is padlocked and the bridges into town condemned, Jillian has no choice but to face the reality that she may be losing the only home she's ever had.
But even when all hope seems lost, Jillian is determined to…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto…
I am an author and educator with a passion for justice. I once finished teaching a lesson on peaceful protest thirty minutes before the students at my middle school led a campus-wide walkout. Unlike me, who didn’t attend my first march until I was thirty, they were ready to speak up, following in the steps of the high schoolers from Parkland and the activists on Instagram. Born into the era of the Arab Spring, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter, they saw the status quo as ripe for the challenge, their voices the anvil to topple it all. The books in this list will be inspiration for any young reader with this same passion for change.
Knowing they’ll be the ones to experience the brunt of climate change’s consequences, young activists have become increasingly vocal as they demand action. Haven Jacobs Saves the Planet provides a close-to-home example of how students can get involved in climate activism as they follow in her discovery of the polluted river near her home. Barbara Dee’s novels take on challenging issues while keeping the characters real and full of heart, and her latest is no exception. This book will inspire young climate activists to take action and force them to consider the challenges—for their community, their family, and their friendships—that changing the world can bring.
From critically acclaimed author Barbara Dee comes a middle grade novel about a young girl who channels her anxiety about the climate crisis into rallying her community to save a local river.
Twelve-year-old Haven Jacobs can’t stop thinking about the climate crisis. In fact, her anxiety about the state of the planet is starting to interfere with her schoolwork, her friendships, even her sleep. She can’t stop wondering why grownups aren’t even trying to solve the earth’s problem—and if there’s anything meaningful that she, as a seventh grader, can contribute.
Long before I became a writer, I was a mom and a teacher. Over some 25 years, I read hundreds, thousands of picture books to kids. I fell in love with the lyrical language, the amazing variety, and the ways picture book authors and illustrators tell a complete story, engage kids (and adults!), and keep readers turning the pages. To me, picture books are an extraordinary gift not only for a young audience, but also for the parents, caregivers, teachers, and librarians who share them with kids. I hope these picture book suggestions inspire you to create special memories with the children you know and love.
It begins when “Nell picks up a seed.” First, there’s a sprout that needs soil and water and sun. The sprout grows, is replanted, and grows some more. Eventually, Nell’s sprout becomes a towering tree enjoyed by her extended close-knit family.
Evocative, rhythmic text leads readers between the here and now of young children climbing Nell’s full-grown pecan tree, and the “before,” when Nell, a child herself, tended the seed, ensuring it would thrive. Rich illustrations add warmth and layers to this tender story about the ways we share ourselves with the family that remains once we are gone.
This gorgeous picture book shows how one little girl's careful tending of a pecan tree creates the living center of a loving, intergenerational Black family. For Earth Day and every day! Perfect for fans of Matt de la Pena and Oge Mora.
Before her grandchildren climbed the towering tree,
explored its secret nests,
raced to its sturdy trunk,
read in its cool shade,
or made pies with its pecans...
Nell buried a seed.
And just as Nell's tree grows and thrives with her love and care, so do generations of her close-knit family.
The Sweet Goodbye weaves a powerful story of duplicity and loss.
It gave me exactly what I want in a crime thriller, a triumvirate of psychological veracity, physical presence, and page-turning suspense. What’s a crime thriller without complex perpetrators and victims, powerful descriptive passages that pull me into the action, and subterfuge that keeps me guessing until the end?
A book I put down. No danger of that with The Sweet Goodbye. Corbett has been nominated for both the Edgar and Arthur Ellis awards. In this novel, he draws readers deep into the Maine timberlands and holds them there with a riveting plot.
In this thrilling new series from Edgar®-nominated author Ron Corbett, the most dangerous predator in the Maine wilderness walks on two feet—and it is Danny Barrett's job to bring him down.
Something is not right in the North Maine Woods.
A small family-run lumber company should not have more than two hundred million unaccountable dollars on their books. Money like that comes from moving something other than wood across the border.
The first agent the FBI sent undercover was their best man—sure to get the answers that were needed. He was dead within a month.
Two women separated by time learn what happens when they embrace their inner magic in this inspiring environmental fiction novel.
Although Sara's college degree provided her an out, she always knew she’d return home to the small logging community that is like family to her. But when she learns the…
My own experiences have made me a strong believer in the potential of journeys, big and small, to change our lives and the way we navigate the world. I made a journey in highly unusual circumstances, a journey that became a pilgrimage, and I think I know now that devotion is the key to transformation on the road. It may be the key to everything, in fact. That’s what I want to read about. Devotion is what every one of these books has in abundance, as well as care for the task, total honesty, and no fear of feeling.
This book cannot be consumed quickly or immediately; it is a book like the desert. I am reading it for the third time, because what I do not yet understand of it I find I believe in anyway, maybe even know already.
I read it to go deeper and further, to clear, to still, to strengthen my mind with clues that it might be possible to reconcile and change the human condition through being intentional in nature and the stories we keep. It is infinitely more mysterious and beautiful than I can say. I am caught between a desire to return to this book endlessly and a fear of committing any part of it to memory.
Two volumes of fiction from the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams: "Lopez feels a deep spiritual connection to the natural world." -San Francisco Chronicle
To National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez, the desert and the river are landscapes alive with poetry, mystery, seduction, and enchantment. In these two works of fiction, the narrator responds viscerally and emotionally to their moods and changes, their secrets and silences, and their unique power. Desert Notes portrays the mystical power of an American desert, and the reflections it sparks in the characters who travel there. River Notes, a companion piece, celebrates the…
