Kids Staff Picks
Yes, beginning readers can be truly hilarious. Evidence: the part where Rabbit spends a whole chapter with a remote control stuck in his ear without realizing it.
-Kate
A nice reminder that even when life seems to be at its worst (you're being attacked by sharks, you're being attacked by tigers, etc etc) the machinations of fate might always change in your favor.
— Laurel
If I were a fish, I would be the pout-pout fish. The epiphany in this book gives me hope for humanity.
-Allison
How much less scary, less lonely, less confusing the world becomes when you carry a star in your pocket.
-Kate
Yet to encounter any work that so lucidly illuminates the idyllic isolation of the happy infant in the world.
— Daniel
The primordial soup of childhood is called to mind in this classic about calendar months and actual soup.
— Sierra
Haven't we all had that moment when we went in for a kiss and accidentally stomped the other person flat instead?
— Kate
This is the book that made me excited to go to school. The fact that marvelous and mischievous teachers like Miss Nelson exist was evidence enough for me that the classroom was a magical place.
— Nora
In which a dog just can't even with these kids.
— Kate
Empowerment for pint-sized feminists. Plus, ponies!
— Cristin
The origin story of real-life superhero RBG is just as cool and meaningful as Batman, or whatever.
— Katy
A classic introduction to the Ancient Greek pantheon with wonderful illustrations. These versions of the myths are fast and fun, perfect for teaching and rereading.
— Jacob
Dumpster dog may be a bit smelly, ratty, and unintelligent, but these are attributes that plague the best of us. Join this sweet dog and his bff Flat Cat in their quest for an owner who will love them with all their flaws.
— Laurel
Princess Magnolia only looks like your standard-issue – until her monster alarm goes off. Perfect for beginning readers and perfect read-alouds for even younger kids – my son has been demanding Princess Magnolia at bedtime since he was two.
— Kate
This book is about a girl who is not a fairy yet, but her mom is. Her mom is very bad with her wand; she forgets the codes and does what are maybe not the right spells. Perfect for readers who want a small adventure.
— Najela, Age 9
All the absurdity and radical wackiness of the Captain Underpants novels with surprisingly little insipidity. If you've ever hated Captain Underpants, this is a welcome and wonderful alternative.
— Allison
96 pages on Eddie, tasked with watching his uncle's pet dragon for a week; the greatest epistolary novel of our generation.
— Cristin
This book is the drawing of the hat in The Little Prince. Exquisitely and plainly, near devastatingly told. No moral. No teaching moment. No pandering. Only magic.
— Allison
I've given this some thought, and I think Laurel Snyder may be my favorite author. Give Charlie and Mouse to someone who loves Frog and Toad, and they will probably love you forever.
— Kate
Despite competition from shady neighborhood thug Wikipedia Brown, our boy EB is still exactly as awesome as he was when you were in elementary school. Anyone who makes it a decade on this earth without knowing this series should be held back from turning 11 until the situation is remedied.
— Cristin
If a brontosaurus in the forest wants to pet little girl, and a bossy little girl in the forest wants a pet brontosaurus, whose will will win?
— Laurel
One way to know that your friend is real, not imaginary, is to eat waffles together.
— Katy
Fifth-grade Mean Girls memoir. This book was slightly painful to read, but only because it rang so true and close to my heart. A moving and funny exploration of the complications of trying to remain your true, weird, individual self even in the face of elementary schoolgirl groupthink. As always, Shannon Hale nails it.
— Laurel
After her friend gets kidnapped by aliens, Zita has no choice but to head to outer space and rescue him. With the help of an angry robot, a quiet mouse, and a clever conman, Zita builds a legend for herself. Lots of fun to read aloud!
— Jacob S.
This book makes me want to high five the entire world.
— Cristin
A tale of palace intrigue full of faith, love, statecraft, and self-discovery, all set in an alternate past in a convent on a remote island. I'm calling all the awards right now for Dylan Meconis and this utterly beautiful graphic novel.
— Kate
I like this book because it's like you're on an adventure!
— Moses, age 7
"Calvin & Hobbes," but sparklier.
— Cristin
Our five Lumberjanes, a diverse and realistic set of characters, are thrown into the world of the supernatural alongside their (understandably) stressed out cabin leader. Very fun and charming.
— Rushy
Have you ever felt like an angry, misunderstood monster hell-bent on the destruction of all humanity, but also like you just want to hang out with your friends and eat pizza?
-Laurel
Ivan is a silverback gorilla who lives in a little zoo attraction inside a shopping mall. His best friends are the other beasts, and he spends his days in observation of the people who come and go. When a baby elephant named Ruby comes to live there, too, Ivan suddenly has to face the reality of his world and find some way to make it better. Adorable and funny and sweet and hopeful, this is going to be an award contender in 2012 for sure.
— Kate
The Ferrante of kids' lit - really that good. Read them now, read them all.
— Laurel
The most twisted, surreal, hilarious, disturbing book in Roald Dahl's body of work includes no magical powers or strange creatures. Boy, Dahl's nonfictional memoir, leaves the reader as wide-eyed and slack-jawed as his fiction. What this account of Dahl's actual childhood demonstrates is that his great achievement as a writer is the precision of his memory. He remembered vividly what the fear of a spanking or the anticipation of a licorice bootlace was like for a child; it would take fantastical stories of impossible worlds to capture them accurately.
— Shuja
After the first time I read Half Magic (and I read it many, many times), I remember carrying around a special coin for a while...just in case.
-Kate
If you are currently in a fight with New York City this book will help you remember why you loved it in the first place.
— Katie Fee
The funniest children's book ever written.
— Sarah
Beneath these cozily domestic scenes from the life of a tight-knit family of hippopotamusesque creatures runs an eeire current of melancholy that called to me as a child.
-Maddie
Two kids run away from their suburban home and hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book is 100% perfect and 95% of the reason why I live in New York City today.
— Katie Fee
At her grandmother's instistance Lucy enrolls in 7th grade at the public middle school after years of homeschooling; at Lucy's insistance they tell no one, not even her teachers, that getting struck by lightning has turned her into a math savant and she is a certifiable numbers genius. This is a love letter to math doing double duty as a picture frame for a phenomenal preteen protagonist. Lucy is one of my all-time favorites.
-Cristin
By the author of the better-known "The Westing Game," this melancholy murder mystery set in Greenwich Village is a perfect novel for kids who prefer art and poetry to wizards and vampires.
— Shuja
The weight of knowing just how wrong they were must be crushing all the fools who thought life couldn't get better after Vegetables in Underwear.
— Cristin
A small boy in a gray city finds a tiny patch of green on an abandoned train track, and the world begins to change. Perfect reading to accompany a trip to the High Line.
— Kate
Paddington readers will likely graduate to Wilde, Wodehouse, and Waugh in short order.
-Shuja
May you live the life of your dreams, but remember you must also find a way to make the world more beautiful.
— Kate
May you live the life of your dreams, but remember you must also find a way to make the world more beautiful.
— Kate
A story of true love and six kinds of transportation.
— Bekah
Don't play innocent with me: if you've ever had an intolerable younger sibling upon whom your entire family inexplicably lavished nauseating amounts of attention, you've acted like Lilly. Read this, laugh a lot at Lilly, then laugh at how terrible you used to be, and then call your sibling up and apologize.
-Matt
As both small children and classic rock bands know, the waiting is the hardest part. This book makes it easier.
— Katie Fee
Oliver Jeffers is here to teach us how to be people.
— Katy
If Michael Jackson had written "Man in the Mirror" about a sunflower seed instead of a man.
— Katie Fee
Petra is a mountain, silent and unmoving. She is a weather-worn pebble tumbling through a singing stream. She has been many things, hidden and visible, majestic and small. She is the scaffold for a universe of your imaginings, the steadfast keeper of your make-believes.
— Margaret
Open it to any page and re-live every single bit of the joy you felt on first discovering Shel Silverstein.
— Kate
This year's Newbery Medal winner has the feel of a true classic, but there's nothing predictable about Barnhill's utterly luminous storytelling. It is, quite simply, one of the most gorgeous works of fantasy I've read in years.
— Kate
Remember around 6th grade when you started to figure out that things weren't always fair, and that even if you did everything right that didn't mean everything would go right for you, and what a devastating gut punch that was? Ali Benjamin really, really gets that.
— Cristin
Charlotte has been sent to boarding school, and already feels out of place, but soon things get a lot weirder, She starts waking up and finding herself in the same bed, in the same school, but instead of the present day it's 1918, where everyone thinks her name is Clare and all the teachers think she's strange and slow. For months, Charlotte wakes up, finding herself alternately in the present day and in the past, beginning to doubt whether she's really Charlotte at all. A dreamy, beautifully written book, I read Charlotte Sometimes first when I was ten (and devoured it), and again at fourteen, when I discovered that The Cure had written a song about it.
— Madeleine
I liked this book so much more when 87% of its title didn't perfectly describe the living nightmare we're suffering through as a nation but even saddled with the context of current events it is one of the funniest things I've ever read. Ideal for your elementary-aged Slytherin.
— Cristin
A young card sharp hooks up with an orphan girl who plays with fireworks to defeat the evil forces that threaten 19th-century New York City. There is so much to talk about here, I could write a whole book about it. If Kate Milford hadn't already beaten me to it.
— Sarah G.
Castle "Ghost" Cranshaw wants to be the greatest...something. Turns out he might be a great sprinter, if he doesn't sabotage his chances. I'm not generally a sports novel reader, but this, the first book in store favorite Jason Reynolds' track series, made me dig my running shoes out of the closet.
— Kate
I waited to begin Orphan Island until I knew I could spend the whole day with it, because I suspected once I dove in I wasn't going to surface until the last page--and I was right. But days later I find myself drifting back to the island and its denizens again and again. Orphan Island is that kind of place and that kind of book. The kid in me was carried away by the wildness and mystery and adventure even as the parent in me ached with the bittersweet and sometimes brutal truths underpinning it all.
— Kate
