A distinctive narrative begins with a young girl observing that there is no color black in the rainbow.
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Cast Away: Poems for Our Time
Lifelong litter picker upper Naomi Shihab Nye documents and reflects on the leavings of our existence in keenly observant, probing, unabashed poems.
Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera
Drawing on the innate drama of the natural world, Fleming and Rohmann recreate the life cycle of a single honeybee from the moment she emerges from the egg to her death 35 days later.
A Map into the World
A quiet, contemplative story in which a Hmong American girl’s year of simple, joyful discoveries culminates with a gift for her grieving neighbor.
Brown Girl Dreaming
“And somehow, one day, it’s just there / speckled black-and white, the paper / inside smelling like something I could fall right into, / live there — inside those clean white pages.” Jacqueline Woodson’s childhood unfolds in poems that beautifully reveal details of her early life and her slow but gradually certain understanding that words and stories and writing were essential to her. Her older sister was shining smart. One of her brothers could sing wonderfully. She would come to realize words were her smart, her singing, her special thing.
Cheryl Minnema Wins 2020 Charlotte Zolotow Award
Author Cheryl Minnema has won the 2020 Charlotte Zolotow Award for her picture book Johnny’s Pheasant (full press release)
For Black Girls Like Me
Makeda (Kade), 11, and her family have moved across country to New Mexico for her dad’s musical career. Kade knows the adjustment, as always, will be complicated by questions: She is Black, and the rest of her family is white.
Why?
A small rabbit has question after question for a large bear, always simply stated as “Why?” Children must infer the specific question from both the accompanying illustration and the bear’s answer in this story that moves across the seasons.
The Run-aways
Grandpa is stuck in the hospital after a bad fall, and he’s not happy about it. He swears a lot, makes unreasonable demands of his nurses, and complains about the food.
Birdsong
Katherena, a young Cree girl, and her mother move from their home by the sea to the country. Over the course of a year, Katherena adapts to her new home and grows close to Agnes, an older woman who lives nearby.