Finding friends can be challenging when everyone seems to be out and about during the day while you follow a nocturnal schedule. Night owl Hester keeps busy with cake decorating, living-room exercise routines, work on her novel, and sewing projects, but sometimes she’s “a bit lonely.” So Hester concocts a plan to stay awake until the sun rises, when she’ll go out and meet others.
2026 books
Navigating Night
Inspired by Leung’s own childhood, this story centers on a Chinese American girl who helps her father, Baba, deliver the takeout orders from their family’s Chinese restaurant. In a time before smartphones and GPS, the girl uses a notebook of addresses and a foldout map spread across her lap to navigate. On one rainy night, their dynamic plays out in a variety of impactful ways.
Holloway
Following her mom’s death from Covid, an illness for which her mom staunchly refused a vaccine and treatment, Nora (white) travels to France to scatter her mom’s ashes at the site of their favorite painting: Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Disappointed by the park’s current appearance, Nora decides to travel instead to Lascaux but goes a bit further than she planned: Passing through a holloway in the trees, she finds herself in the year 1946.
Sherlock Roach and the Case of the Crunchy Crumb
Famous bug detective Sherlock Roach and his trusty sidekick, Dr. Wormston, are reading the newspaper in their dapper duds (bowtie and deerstalker hat for Sherlock, waistcoat and bowler for Wormston) when there’s a knock at the door. Lucille the Ladybug has been robbed!
A Scar Like a River
Thirteen-year-old Fallon (white) has three secrets. She’s shared one of them—about who gave her the scar across her face—with her best friend. But when Fallon’s uncle Geebie dies, the trauma from her past resurfaces.
Black Hands: Builders of Our Nation
Weatherford traces the impact of Black effort and achievement on U.S. history and culture in this powerful picture book utilizing the refrain “Black hands.”
Bad Badger: A Family Story
Beloved badger Septimus is back for another adventure. In this sequel to Bad Badger: A Love Story, Septimus is co-parenting three downy seagull hatchlings with Gully, who is often at the seashore fishing for meals for the ever-hungry chicks. Septimus’s curated and comfortable home life is barely a memory as he busily tends the needy babies.
The Blue House I Loved
“On a plot of grass off Maryland Avenue … on the east side of St. Paul, there was once a blue house that I loved.” The narrator, a Hmong refugee, recounts childhood memories big and small, describing in loving the detail the old house’s layout and the family members who lived there.
Puffins!
Follow the journey of a puffin family on Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock Island in this joyful, appealing nonfiction picture book. Puffin mates meet, and Mother Puffin lays a single egg while Father Puffin patrols the burrow.
Medicine Wheels
Bryce’s mom has struggled with alcohol and holding down a job since his dad’s death several years earlier. When things blow up with her latest boyfriend, she takes off, leaving Bryce and an unpaid motel bill behind. Bryce (Ojibwe) goes to his paternal grandparents’ trailer home on the Wolf Creek Reservation in Minnesota, where he stays for the summer.