PICTURE BOOKS
Animal Albums From A to Z
By Cece Bell
Twenty-six artfully designed, winningly goofy, faux-vintage record jackets gently spoof vinyl’s golden age, with animals standing in for iconic performers. One tune on each album gets the full treatment: lyrics by Bell plus an audio track composed and produced by her real-life musician pals.
Pepper & Me
By Beatrice Alemagna
Alemagna pays whimsical and moving tribute to the way children process the yucky yet intriguing surprises served up by their bodies in this reluctant love story between a young girl and the huge scab that appears after she scrapes her knee.
Something About the Sky
By Rachel Carson. Illustrated by Nikki McClure.
McClure brings Carson’s long-forgotten, soulful serenade to the science of clouds (written for the TV program “Omnibus” in response to a child’s request for “something about the sky”) to lyrical cut-paper life in a tender visual poem that’s as boldly defiant of category as Carson herself.
There Was a Shadow
By Bruce Handy. Illustrated by Lisk Feng.
Handy’s words and Feng’s images exquisitely intertwine to cast shadows in a new light: Three children and a dog frolic in a meadow, accompanied by their jubilant doubles, then rest under the canopy of a tree, where shade equals sanctuary, before making their way home as day gradually stretches into night.
The Yellow Bus
By Loren Long
In art done entirely by hand — with graphite and charcoal pencil, X-acto blades and acrylic paint (never mind the 10-foot-long three-dimensional model Long built of the setting, and lit like a cinematographer) — this touching ode to joy follows a single school bus on its route through a valley that changes with time, technology and weather, until the steadfast yellow vessel becomes one with nature.
CHAPTER BOOK
A Day With Mousse
By Claire Lebourg. Translated by Sophie Lewis.
For Mousse, Lebourg’s green-striped titular creature, living happily alone by the sea, every day is full of sweet rituals — like sipping coffee and listening to the radio while watching the tide come in (straight into his living room, where he takes his morning swim) — until one day a walrus named Barnacle washes up and disturbs his solitary bliss.
MIDDLE GRADE
Amazing Grapes
By Jules Feiffer
In the legendary cartoonist’s first graphic novel for young readers, about a fractured family’s madcap attempts to find one another in a prismatic world called “the Lost Dimension,” we see the illustrator of “The Phantom Tollbooth,” now 95, at his most fluid, fierce and free.
Louder Than Hunger
By John Schu
Schu’s harrowing and life-affirming autobiographical novel in verse, about an anorexic boy who learns to talk back to his inner bully — with the help of therapy, a love of literature and a ferocious passion for Broadway shows — is one of very few books for adolescents to address eating disorders from a male point of view, and it roars.
The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
By John Hendrix
This fascinating graphic-novel-style biographical study — with charming, expressive drawings and a framing narrative featuring a jaunty lion and a genteel wizard — makes a powerful case that if these two men had never met, it’s likely neither would have written their greatest works and 20th-century pop culture would have taken an entirely different course.
One Big Open Sky
By Lesa Cline-Ransome
Telling the story of one Black family’s perilous covered-wagon journey from the South to the West through the eyes of three brave female characters — an 11-year-old girl, her pregnant mother and a young teacher they meet along the way — Cline-Ransome’s evocative, meticulously researched novel in verse, a mix of richly textured description and vibrant dialogue, adds (hitherto absent) women’s voices to the history of the late-19th-century Black homesteaders movement.
Plain Jane and the Mermaid
By Vera Brosgol
As flecks from fairy tales we know and love sparkle across the pages of this graphic novel like antique glitter, to be spun anew, Brosgol rescues her heroine from the imagination of Hans Christian Andersen, relieving her of the agony his protagonists often suffer and giving her the power to breathe underwater — the chance of a “happily,” rather than only the darkening fate of an “ever after.”
Wildful
By Kengo Kurimoto
Kurimoto’s captivating debut graphic novel, about a girl who finds solace and meaning after the death of her grandmother when she follows her dog through a hole in a fence, rivals “The Secret Garden” in its joyful reverence for nature.
The post The Best Children’s Books of 2024 appeared first on New York Times.
