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1 week ago | 
kirkusreviews.com | Laura Hughes |Drew Daywalt |Oliver Jeffers
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of... Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol. The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip.
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1 month ago | 
kirkusreviews.com | David Mas Masumoto |Lauren Tamaki |Laura Hughes |Marilyn Sadler
A mouthwatering gem to share with young gardeners everywhere. “A peach, like a story, needs time to grow.”Midori, a young Japanese American girl, strides into her family’s orchard, followed by her Jiichan (Grandfather), to find ripe peaches. She takes a bite of one but…“crunch!” It’s still too hard.
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2 months ago | 
kirkusreviews.com | Joanna Gaines |Laura Hughes
A contemplative story on the healing power of nature. Ananda’s mother regales her with stories about how the river springs from a Himalayan glacier and is revered as a goddess. She tells her that the Ganga is “the greatest mother of all.” When Mamma falls ill, Ananda and her aunt travel to bathe in the Ganga’s healing waters and pray for her. As they enter the freezing river, light clay lamps, and chant Mamma’s favorite prayer, the weight of Ananda’s sadness is lifted away by a sense of hope.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Laura Hughes |Marilyn Sadler |Stephanie Laberis
Recommended for preschool and elementary collections on family topics. A child struggles with complex feelings as their parents divorce. The brown-haired, light-skinned narrator and their parents are a tightknit family. With their mom, the protagonist bakes, draws, and builds cardboard houses; with their dad, they go on walks, make up stories, and roughhouse. They love their time with each parent, but when all three are together, things don’t always go as smoothly.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Camille Garoche |Laura Hughes
A lively look at community, connections, and ways to foster change. Saturdays are a flurry of chores at Meena’s house. She and her sisters help her mother shop and tidy up to prep the house for a deluge of visitors. Meanwhile, her brother lounges in bed reading. Meena knows this is unfair, but her mother says that’s just the way things have always been since she was a little girl growing up. Meena’s family, the first to emigrate from their village in India, help others who come later.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Devon Holzwarth |Nicole Miles |Laura Hughes
A touching reminder that the stories of our ancestors light the way for generations to come. Two brown-skinned, Latine-cued children playing in an attic discover a suitcase filled with letters and photos as well as a key dangling from a long gold chain. Excitedly, they rush to ask Mamá to tell them the story of these items. She explains how she and their father met, starting with his childhood in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Jon Brokenbrow |Laura Hughes |Marilyn Sadler |Stephanie Laberis
by Azahara Castillo ; illustrated by Maite García Lliso ; translated by Jon Brokenbrow ‧A child turns fear into peace while figuring out how to deal with monster-shaped anxiety. The light-skinned, blond-haired girl cowers, hides, and flees from the scribbly black blob. Wherever the child goes, it follows, and she feels alone in her struggle. “I asked other people to help me, but nobody else could see it,” she explains.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Jairo Buitrago |Elisa Amado |Laura Hughes |Christina Geist
by Jairo Buitrago ; illustrated by Linda Wolfsgruber ; translated by Elisa Amado ‧The history of the world presented lovingly through an intimate lens. A parcel of land turns out to be steeped in history. On the top of a small hill, a group of young girls relax under the sunny sky with their shoes off.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Jennifer Maruno |Camille Garoche |Laura Hughes
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature. Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Bob Shea |James Dean |Laura Hughes
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose amongPete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude. If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations.
