I've been writing and drawing children’s books and comic books for kids for over 23 years. I've always loved the comic book format and visual storytelling. Reading pictures is actually very stimulating for kids and adults alike. I’m also a parent to three daughters and teach art at an elementary school locally, so I work with children and see what captures their imaginations and inspires them. As someone who’s written and illustrated numerous graphic novels for kids, moderates a children’s book review group, and reads so many of the newest books available, I selected these graphic novels as some of the best I’ve read in the different genres that have been released recently.
In this magical and otherworldly graphic novel a village of desert dwellers were gifted by the moon spirit three enchanted moon moths and taught how to raise them so they would pollinate a special tree called “The Night Flower Tree”.
This miraculous tree bestows special gifts upon the desert people. Young Anya is to become a moth keeper and carry the “Moth Keeper’s Lantern”. This lantern keeps the moths from returning to their home in the stars and bound to earth.
This story is full of stunning artwork and magical scenes. Just an incredible coming-of-age story as Anya begins her apprenticeship. The reading level is spot on for ages 8 and up. A truly enchanting story.
Being a Moth Keeper is a huge responsibility and a great honor, but what happens when the new Moth Keeper decides to take a break from the moon and see the sun for the first time? From the author of the beloved Tea Dragon Society comes a must-read for fans of the rich fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki and the magical adventures of Witch Hat Atelier.
Anya is finally a Moth Keeper, the protector of the lunar moths that allow the Night-Lily flower to bloom once a year. Her village needs the flower to continue thriving and Anya is excited to…
When I was growing up, my favorite books were about kids getting lost in the wilderness. Now, as an artist and writer, I love to create stories about people’s connection to land and the plants and animals that inhabit natural spaces. The inspiration for my picture book biography, Alexander von Humboldt: Explorer, Naturalist & Environmental Pioneer, came after hiking many of the volcanoes that Humboldt had climbed some 200 years earlier in South America. Besides hiking, I occupy myself with drawing and watercolor painting, climate activism, and looking at bugs and rocks with my daughters. I’ve published four graphic novels, two picture books, and a cookbook about rice.
So simple and yet so poetic (both visually and lyrically), We All Play is a catalog of human and more-than-human animals delighting in movement and sound in the outdoors.
This book is great for a younger (baby and toddler) readership, and highlights our connection with all living beings. It also peppers in some Cree language words, which are fun to explore. I love the adorable drawings of animals and children that Flett created with the ochres and umbers of her earthy palette.
A BEST CHILDREN'S BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington Post, New York Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, Globe and Mail, Horn Book, and Boston Globe
STARRED Reviews in Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, The Horn Book, School Library Journal
From Julie Flett, the beloved author and illustrator of Birdsong, comes a joyous new book about playtime for babies, toddlers, and kids up to age 7.
Animals and kids love to play! This wonderful book celebrates playtime and the connection between children and the natural world. Beautiful illustrations show:
birds who chase and chirp! bears who wiggle and wobble! whales who swim…
I’ve always been drawn to coming-of-age stories. These are the years when you’re leaving the somewhat cocooned world of childhood and entering the intimidating but (arguably) more exciting world of adolescence. Although I’m now in my 70s, I still love a good coming-of-age story!
I had the pleasure of getting to know Richard Peck right before the publication of my first novel after I had given his name (as well as Jerry Spinelli’s) to my publisher when my editor asked for a short list of writers I’d like galleys sent to in search of early reactions. Dreamland Lake is the reason I added Richard to my list after discovering that, similar to my soon-to-be-published novel, it was the story of two boys finding a dead body. Peck’s ear for dialogue and eye for detail is impeccable, as is his fluent narration. Dreamland Lake is an underrated gem!
Flip and Brian have been best friends since grade school. But everything changes during the spring of seventh grade. That's when they find a man lying dead in the leaves near Dreamland Lake. What happens in the summer that follows will change the course of their friendship—and their lives—forever.
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
This book was published over fifteen years
ago, but a friend of mine told me I’d love it…and I did. It’s set in a blue-collar Brooklyn
neighborhood in 1947.
It’s the touching
story of two vivid characters. An
eleven-year-old Irish Catholic kid named Michael Devlin and a Rabbi from
Prague. A refugee named Judah Hirsch. The rabbi hires Michael to be a Shabbos
Goy. He shows up on Saturdays to turn on the lights and other things prohibited
by Jewish law on the Sabbath. They forge an unlikely friendship as Michael
learns about Prague and its destruction by the Nazis and the rabbi learns about
Jackie Robinson and baseball.
It’s gritty
and grounded, but full of magical realism. The descriptions are vivid and
Hamill creates a real sense of place. It enthralled me the same way A
Gentleman in Moscow did with characters full of hope and courage and
humanity.
This book is . . . a survey history of medicine from the earliest times, centered thematically on how changing concepts of disease have affected its management. . . . One finds a gratifying mastery of recent as well as classic scholarship in medical history and a careful sidestepping of positivistic excesses. . . . Disease and Its Control is a fresh and welcome synthesis of historical scholarship that will be accessible to interested laymen. Annals of Internal Medicine
Look, it’s simple really. Peter Pan visited me when I was young, abducted me, and showed me that remaining a big kid is much more beneficial than becoming a boring adult with too many responsibilities. I’ve published multiple MG books and prefer this genre’s colourful, exciting stories. I’m also Australian, and we have a weird sense of humour, so I’m not sure if that classifies as expertise on this particular subject, but let’s go with that.
Children will find this funny. How could they not, when the entire book is through the perspective of an actual imaginary friend, getting up to mischievous antics? For adults though, it's more like Toy Story 3 as you realise the imaginary friends are contemplating their own mortality, wondering how they could possibly survive when their friends literally disappear once the human stops 'believing' in them. So, look, 50/50 from a comedic level. Solid 90 for overall enjoyment.
Budo is Max's imaginary friend. He and his fellow imaginary friends watch over their children until the day comes that the child stops imagining them. And then they're gone. Budo has lasted a lot longer than most imaginary friends - four years - because Max needs him more. His parents argue about sending him to a special school. But Max is perfectly happy if everything is just kept the way it is, and nothing out of the ordinary happens. Unfortunately, something out of the ordinary is going to happen - and then he'll need Budo more than ever...
I grew up in a woodsy Massachusetts town, then spent the first decade of my adult life striving to succeed as a painter in New York--while reading fiction as if inhaling another form of oxygen. In my thirties I traded paintbrush for pencil, persevering until I published my first novel at 46. I've now written six novels and a story collection about the volatile bonds of modern families, through marriages, births, betrayals, illnesses, deaths, and shifting loyalties. I love to tell a single story from multiple perspectives, ages, and genders; to inhabit a different vocation in each new character: bookseller, biologist, pastry chef, teacher. Like actors, fiction writers love slipping into countless other lives.
Confession: I bought this novel partly for its gorgeous floral jacket...a bait-and-switch for the emotional claustrophobia in which it begins. I fell in love with it because of how deep I was drawn into lives I didn't think I could care about. Fred, a retired engineering professor--wife deceased, son severely disabled, adoptive daughter estranged--has banished himself to wither self-righteously away in a retirement village. But circumstances force him to let someone in: his neighbor, Jan, who's suffered her own misfortunes yet leads the most engaged life she can.
Set in Australia, this increasingly exhilarating and witty novel shows how it's never too late to face down eviscerating truths, make amends, and flout conventions; also, how friendships can save us (as I learned during my year of heartbreak). As a writer, I was stunned by an extended real-time scene in which an automotive mishap lands Jan and Fred in a glamorous…
Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village. Surrounded and obstructed by the debris of his life, he is determined to be miserable, but is tired of his existence and of the life he has chosen.
When a series of unfortunate incidents forces him and his neighbour, Jan, together, he begins to realise the damage done by the accumulation of a lifetime's secrets and lies, and to comprehend his own shortcomings. Finally, Frederick Lothian has the…
Novelist, poet and scriptwriter. My interest in young narrators stems from a desire to effectively capture the voices of children in my novels. Creative writing PhD studies with the University of South Wales encouraged me to research different strategies and techniques used by published authors and to experiment with them in my writing. The String Games my debut novel was the result of this academic and creative journey. Further novels continue to include young voices in a starring role as I get inside the heads of a range of characters. After a stint as a university lecturer, I dabbled in fiction for children and through a collaboration with illustrator Fiona Zechmeister, Pandemonium a children’s picture book was published in 2020.
Five-year-old Peony narrates the story of her life in Southern France and the imaginary world which she creates with the younger Margot. Known as Pea, she lives in a rundown farmhouse, where her recently bereaved and heavily pregnant English mother sleeps most of the time. Bold and brave, Pea’s ability to cope with absent parenting is beautifully imagined. She looks after herself and Margo and makes forays into the community her mother has rejected. The language she uses and her understanding of the world is delightfully quirky.
During one long, hot summer, five-year-old Pea and her little sister Margot play alone in the meadow behind their house, on the edge of a small village in Southern France. Her mother is too sad to take care of them; she left her happiness in the hospital, along with the baby. Pea's father has died in an accident and Maman, burdened by her double grief and isolated from the village by her Englishness, has retreated to a place where Pea cannot reach her - although she tries desperately to do so.
Then Pea meets Claude, a man who seems to…
Lawrence Osborne’s books lie somewhere between thrillers, memoirs, psychological investigations, and cross-cultural mysteries. He has been likened to Graham Greene, Paul Bowles, and Ian McEwen, but his stories are truly contemporary in feeling and could be called Expat Noir.
I loved this book for its depiction of the confusions experienced by a veteran British journalist as he attempted to unravel the disappearance of a student protestor amidst the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. His descriptions of the city, its texture and sensations, and the increasing difficulties arising from powerful political pressures as he follows tangled threads involving his own deep feelings for the missing student are brilliantly interwoven.
I can’t think of any other author treading this terrain so well: the white middle-class expatriate in Asia has become something of a taboo subject, but this book shows how much can be learnt from a still unravelling colonial…
A veteran British journalist living in Hong Kong investigates the disappearance of a student protestor amidst the pro-democracy demonstrations in this unsettling new novel from the acclaimed author of The Forgiven
After twenty years as an ex-pat reporter in Hong Kong, Adrian Gyle has almost nothing to show for it. But now the streets are choked with students demanding democratic freedoms, and the old world is beginning to fall apart.
Adrian's old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family, has begun a reckless affair with Rebecca, a leading pro-democracy protestor. But when Rebecca disappears and Jimmy…
As a writer my storylines almost always develop out of the characters and settings I first create. As a reader, I enjoy a book as much (sometimes more!) for the characters and setting in it as I do for the plot itself. My favorite reads have always featured a quirky or bigger-than-life character and a setting that in some instances may seem ordinary but the circumstances of how the character ended up there are far from that. I love the middle-grade novels on my list because the main characters are brave and resourceful and each has an unusual and intriguing path that has led them to where their story takes place.
Sheila Turnage’s brilliant, snappy writing makes this gem of a mystery one of my all-time favorites. There’s a lot going on in Tupelo Landing where Mo LoBeau washed ashore as a baby after a hurricane. Now being raised by the Colonial and Lana who run the best (and only) Café in town, Mo and her BFF Dale try to solve a murder in which her loved ones may be implicated. Loads of funny and fun in this series. Sidenote: I was elated when a School Library Journal reviewer said this about my novel Lizzy and the Good Luck Girl “. . .delightful details create a similar air to recent quirky classics such as Sheila Turnage’s Three Times Lucky.…”. Swoon!!!!
Rising sixth grader Miss Moses LoBeau lives in the small town of Tupelo Landing, NC, where everyone's business is fair game and no secret is sacred. She washed ashore in a hurricane eleven years ago, and she's been making waves ever since. Although Mo hopes someday to find her "upstream mother," she's found a home with the Colonel - a cafe owner with a forgotten past of his own - and Miss Lana, the fabulous cafe hostess. She will protect those she loves with every bit of her strong will and tough attitude. So when a lawman comes to town…
Addie is a young, autistic girl in Scotland. She learns dozens of women were executed for witchcraft right in her own village. She is horrified even though it took place hundreds of years before.
Addie feels a kinship with the women and becomes determined to create a memorial for them. Unfortunately, other than her big sister and her best friend, no one else understands her passion for women who died so long ago.
The story is written in first person, and is an #ownvoices book, as the author, Elle McNicoll, is autistic herself. Neurodiverse people are under-represented in literature, but A Kind of Spark helps readers see that autistic people can be the heroes of their own stories.
Perfect for readers of Song for a Whale and Counting by 7s, a neurodivergent girl campaigns for a memorial when she learns that her small Scottish town used to burn witches simply because they were different.
"A must-read for students and adults alike." -School Library Journal, Starred Review
Ever since Ms. Murphy told us about the witch trials that happened centuries ago right here in Juniper, I can’t stop thinking about them. Those people weren’t magic. They were like me. Different like me.
I’m autistic. I see things that others do not. I hear sounds that they can ignore. And…
