Books Too Good to Miss for Younger Readers

​Nancy Brashear and Carolyn Angus
 
As reviewers, we weed our bookshelves each January to make room for new releases. As book lovers, we add some books to our personal collections and put some aside for grandchildren and special friends. As advocates of reading, we will send the others to schools and libraries, but before we do, here is our list of books published in 2023 that are too good to miss—books we would love to see in the hands of all children and teachers.

​Apart, Together: A Book About Transformation. Linda Booth Sweeney. Illus. by Ariel Rutland. (2023). Balzer + Bray.
Together, Sweeney’s lyrical text and Rutland’s bold, colorful double-spread illustrations present a child-friendly introduction to how separate things can become something new when they come together. Apart, Together begins with simple pairings. For example, “APART, blue is blue and / yellow is yellow, but . . . // TOGETHER, they make green!” The transformations then become more complicated and metaphorical. For example, at soccer practice, “APART, players kick a ball . . . // TOGETHER they score!” (PreS Up) 

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​The Bear and the Wildcat. Kazumi Yumoto. Illus. by Komako Sakai. (2023). Gecko. “One morning, Bear was crying. His best friend, a little bird, was dead.” This beautifully crafted picture book tells the story of Bear’s inconsolable grief until he meets a wildcat who understands his loss and helps him remember the special times he shared with the little bird. The wildcat, a traveling violinist, offers him friendship and a hopeful path of recovery with the gift of a tambourine and an invitation to join him in traveling as the Bear and Wildcat Band. (PreK Up) 

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​The Bone Wars: The True Story of the Epic Battle to Find Dinosaur Fossils. Jane Kurtz. Illus. by Alexander Vidal. (2023). Beach Lane.
Meeting in 1863, paleontologists O. C. Marsh (1831-1899) and Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) became friends and collaborators until Marsh pointed out a mistake Cope made in attaching the skull to the tail of a dinosaur he named Elasmosaurus. “And that’s when . . . the Bone Wars began,” the bitter competition between the two fossil hunters to make the next big discovery. (author’s note, illustrator’s note, selected sources, suggested reading) (PrekUp) 

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​Champion Chompers, Super Stinkers and Other Poems by Extraordinary Animals. Linda Ashman. Illus. by Aparna Varma. (2023). Kids Can.
A call for animal contestants becomes a guessing game to identify who takes first place. Each recto page features a mask poem and a part of the animal’s body. A page turn reveals the name, a portrait, and a paragraph of facts about the winner. Among the 18 winning contestants are peregrine falcon for fastest flyer, North American beaver for best engineer, and Etruscan shrew for smallest mammal. (protecting endangered animals, about measurements, about mask poems, recommended reading, glossary) (PreK Up) 

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​Creep, Leap, Crunch!: A Food Chain Story. Jody Jensen Shaeffer. Illus. by Christopher Silas Neal. (2023). Knopf.
In this cumulative story, grass is nibbled by a cricket that is eaten by a brown deer mouse and so on up a simple food chain of consumers: a red milk snake, red hawk, red fox, and black bear. But some days, each animal alludes its predator, and the story ends with the bear munching “flowers and seeds … / …all that she needs,” and they all live to forage another day. (illustrated glossary) (PreK-Gr 2) 

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​Evergreen. Matthew Cordell. (2023). Feiwel and Friends.
Evergreen, a young squirrel who lacks courage, must conquer her fears when she must journey alone through Buckthorn Forest to deliver an empty acorn full of her mother’s healing soup to sick Granny Oak. Along the way, Evergreen hears strange noises, makes some friends, eludes some enemies, and almost loses the soup several times before delivering it safely to Granny Oak. Cordell’s animal fantasy with a lively text and detailed, ink-and-watercolor illustrations, organized in six parts during which Evergreen’s I-can-do-it confidence grows, has a surprise ending. (PreK Up) 

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​Friend of Numbers: The Life of Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Priya Narayanan. Illus. by Satwik Gade. (2023). Eerdmans.
Growing up in southern India, Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan (1887-1920) was observant, full of questions, and fascinated with numbers. “They made patterns only he could see.” Traveling to England in 1914 to study mathematics under Professor Godfrey Hardy at Cambridge University, Ramanujan continued to discover more and more complex numerical patterns and gained worldwide recognition as a mathematical genius. (author’s note, patterns in numbers, sample problems, glossary) (PreK Up) 

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Friends Beyond Measure: A Story Told with Infographics. Lalena Fisher. (2023). Harper.
Narrator Ana tells about becoming best friends with Harwin on the first day they meet and doing everything together—until Harwin reveals that her family is moving far away, and they must make plans for how to remain best friends forever. Young readers will delight in poring over the charts, diagrams, pictograms, maps, and other infographics in Fisher’s humorously detailed cartoon-like illustrations. (glossary of infographics with activities) (PreK Up)

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​Hippos Remain Calm. Sandra Boynton. (2023) Boynton Bookworks.
“Two fine hippos, / cozy at home, // take turns reciting / a morning-time poem” from The Big Book of Hippoetry. They calmly face some surprises during the day including a visit with one lonely friend that turns into a night of partying with a herd of hippos before they head home at dawn to snooze all morning long. For a fun read-aloud session, pair this rhyming picture book with Boynton’s first book, Hippos Go Berserk! (1977). (PreS Up) 

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​My Head Has a Bellyache: And More Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown-Ups (Mischievous Nonsense #2). Chris Harris. Illus. by Andrea Tsurumi. (2023). Little, Brown.
From front cover to back cover, this companion to I’m Just Not Good at Rhyming (2017) is chock full of nonsense including silly rhymes, concrete poems, haiku, limericks, fractured fables, and other forms of creative wordplay. Harris’s energetic, snarky, and clever words spill across page after page with occasional hilarious footnotes, accompanied by Tsurumi’s cartoon-like illustrations, for a laugh-until-your-belly-hurts reading experience for all. (glossary, indices by title and subject) (PreK Up) 

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​My Incredible India. Jasbinder Bilan. Illus. by Nina Chakrabarti. (2023). Candlewick.
When she visits Nanijee (her grandmother), Thara takes one memento from an old trunk and hears a story of Nanijee’s travels all over India.  Each entry in My Incredible India features a boxed section about the special object from the trunk (for example, a small metal tuk-tuk or a model of the Taj Mahal), where it came from, brief paragraphs of related facts, and numerous colorful illustrations with captions. (time line, biographical note on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Indian flag, index, resources) (Gr 3-5) 

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​Penny & Pip. Candace Fleming. Illus. by Eric Rohmann. (2023). Caitlyn Dlouhy.
On a class visit to the natural history museum, Penny sees a baby dinosaur hatching from an egg in a corner of a dinosaur exhibit, and the dinosaur sees Penny and follows her around the museum. In the lunchroom, he eats some of her cheese crackers, burps, and squeaks “Pip, pip.” In the Dinosaur Hall full of ancient skeletons, Penny realizes Pip is all alone and devises a clever plan to take him home with her and “into the future . . . together.” (PreK-Gr 2) 

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​Robot, Unicorn, Queen: Poems for You and Me. Shannon Bramer. Illus. by Irene Luxbacher. (2023). Groundwood.
Bramer’s new poetry collection, a companion to Climbing Shadows: Poems for Children (2019), explores various childhood experiences. Some of the 22 poems are playful and silly while others delve into thoughts and feelings from a child’s point of view.  Luxbacher embellishes each poem with a stunning illustration created with watercolor, gouache, pencil, found paper, and digital collage. (author’s note) (PreK Up) 

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​A Spider Named Itsy. Steve Light. (2023). Candlewick.
With a spare, rhythmic text and playful ink-and-watercolor illustrations, Light elaborates on “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” nursery rhyme. On the fateful day after a tree limb fell and destroyed his web on a watering can, Itsy sets out to construct a new web under the gutter of a house and meets some other insects ascending the crooked waterspout. A heavy rain washes them back down but after the sun comes out, they all climb the spout again, and the story ends with “New web home, newfound friends.” (PreS Up) 

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​The Stars and Other Stories (Bear & Bird #2). Jarvis. (2023). Candlewick.
In four short stories, unlikely best friends Bear and Bird quarrel over something silly and decide to get new best friends, have a surprise go awry, nearly lose each other, and discover that looking up at the stars with your “bestest” of friends is perfect. Jarvis’s crayon-like illustrations featuring these two charming characters add warmth and humor to the stories in this series for newly independent readers about the ups and downs of an enduring friendship. (PreK-Gr 2) 

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​Stone Age Beasts. Ben Lerwill. Illus. by Grahame Baker-Smith. (2023). Candlewick.  
Following an introduction to the Stone Age, which started nearly three million years ago, Lerwill and Baker-Smith provide profiles of the wooly mammoth, elephant bird, Steller’s sea cow, and 15 other majestic animals that lived alongside humans then. Each double-spread entry includes a spectacular portrait and introductory paragraphs written in a conversational tone, smaller text boxes of other interesting facts, and a side bar with scientific name, weight, date of extinction, range (with map), and a comparison of its size to that of an adult human. (glossary) (Gr 3 Up) 

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​The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread (Deluxe Anniversary Edition). Kate DiCamillo. Illus. by Timothy Basil Ering. (2023). Candlewick.
This 20th anniversary edition of The Tale of Despereaux includes a new short story, “The Tapestry at Norendy,” the perfect link between DiCamillo’s Newbery Medal-winning fanciful, adventurous tale about a heroic small mouse named Despereaux Tilling and The Norendy Tales, her new series of original fairy tales. The first book in the planned trilogy, The Puppets of Spelhhorst, was published in 2023; book two, The Hotel Balzaar, will be published in October 2024. (Gr 3-5)

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​Too Small Tola Gets Tough (Too Small Tola #3). Atinuke. Illus. by Onyinye Iwu. (2023). Chronicle.  
Too Small Tola, who lives with Grandmommy and her older siblings, Moji and Dapo, in “a run-down block of apartments in the megacity of Lagos, in the country of Nigeria,” is worried when even her beloved megacity cannot fight off the deadly virus plaguing the world and goes into lockdown. In three episodic stories, Tola proves that she is small but mighty, as well as clever and resourceful, when she takes on her family’s economic challenges of surviving the pandemic. (PreK Up) 

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​We Are Human Animals. Rosie Haine. (2023). Eerdmans.
With a spare text and stunning double-spread illustrations, Haine introduces young readers to a family of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gathers living in what is now France about 25,000 years ago when planet Earth was very different. This accessible story of our Stone Age ancestors ends on a thought-provoking note: “This was tens of thousands of years ago, // The world is very different now, but . . . // We are still human animals.” (author’s note) (PreK Up) 

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​What Rosa Brought. Jacob Sager Weinstein. Illus. by Eliza Wheeler. (2023). Katherine Tegen.
Young Rosa lived in Vienna, being cared for by Grandma, while her parents worked in the family’s grocery store. “Then the Nazis, came, and things changed.” With rising anti-Semitism making life dangerous for Jews and new rules that prohibit them from owning stores making survival difficult, the family eventually obtains three visas to America. Rosa wonders what she will bring with her, until Grandma, who will not be going, says Rosa will be taking her love with her. “And that’s what Rosa brought.” (authors note, photographs)  (PreK Up)

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Nancy Brashear is Professor Emeritus of English from Azusa Pacific University, in Azusa, California. Carolyn Angus is former Director of the George G. Stone Center for Children’s Books, Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California.