Picking Tea with Baba

Joining Baba in picking tea leaves on the mountain near their Chinese village is “a special treat” for this book’s narrator and his brother. Mama joins them, too. After a steep trek, the family reaches a “serene” garden striped with orderly rows of green tea shrubs.

Raven’s Ribbons

“Boom-boom. Shuffle-shuffle.” Raven loves taking part in round dances, holding his grandma’s hand as “round and round they go” with other members of their Indigenous community. Raven especially admires the vibrant ribbon skirts worn by girls and women. Many of them were sewn by his grandmother, the colors carefully chosen for each individual.

Make a Pretty Sound: A Story of Ella Jenkins—The First Lady of Children’s Music

“Ella is a South Side girl, a Bronzeville bird, skipping in streets that smell of sweets and black-eyed peas.” A narrative that pulses with rhythm and sings with lyrical language describes the life of Ella Jenkins, who was attuned to the sounds of the world around her, including music, from the time she was a child growing up in Chicago.

This Table

What began as a seed that grows into a tree ends up as a table, but that’s barely the beginning of this warm-hearted picture book about the table–and members of a single family–across years. It’s a table around which (and under!) the bustling, growing multigenerational family gathers for celebrations and quiet moments; art projects, puzzles and imaginative play; homework and grown-up work; and much more.

The Fabulous Fannie Farmer: Kitchen Scientist and America’s Cook

Fannie Farmer loved cooking as a child. When she lost the use of a leg as a teenager due to polio, her love of cooking helped reshape her vision for the future; while she recovered, she cooked. Fannie noticed that the imprecise instructions and measurements in most recipes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., “a suspicion of nutmeg”) made for inconsistent results.

Just Us

Every year during the winter holidays, the young narrator’s Grandma flies in to visit, and her aunts and uncles arrive at her house by car with all the cousins. “Every year we play charades, loud and rowdy. Then we light a fire in the fireplace and eat Grandma’s three kinds of pie. That’s what happens every year. It’s tradition.”

A Star Shines Through

The school-age child narrator and their parents used to live in a city, in an apartment with a star-shaped cardboard lamp in the kitchen window. “When I returned home from music lessons … I could recognize our window from afar: a star shone through the cold November darkness.” When war begins, the child and their mother flee to another country.