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Jan 22, 2025 | 
hbook.com | Kitty Flynn |Annisha Jeffries |Adrienne L. Pettinelli |Megan Lambert
The votes have been counted; the readers have spoken. Calling Caldecott’s 2025 Mock Vote Winner is {{drum roll, please}}: The Yellow Bus, written and illustrated by Loren Long. And our one Honor Book is: Home in a Lunchbox, written and illustrated by Cherry Mo. Excellent choices! Congratulations to Loren Long and Cherry Mo, and to all the Calling Caldecott voters! Thanks so much for playing along with us.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
hbook.com | Kitty Flynn |Annisha Jeffries |Adrienne L. Pettinelli |Megan Lambert
And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for! Okay, not that moment (the YMA announcements on Jan. 27), but here at Calling Caldecott it’s what we’ve been working toward since last September. It’s time to select your top three choices for the most distinguished picture book of 2024.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
hbook.com | Adrienne L. Pettinelli |Megan Lambert
A bummer about Caldecott is that not all the excellent and worthwhile picture books published in a given year can win. There’s only one Caldecott winner, and even if committees are generous with their honors, many books can’t and won’t receive Caldecott recognition. However, there are a number of other awards that recognize distinguished picture books. Let’s look at a few of them.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
hbook.com | Kitty Flynn |Megan Lambert |Adrienne L. Pettinelli
It happens each Calling Caldecott season. We start out in September full of excitement and high hopes that we will be able to weigh in on all the books on our list...and now it's January and we've run out of time. On Thursday this week the polls will open for our mock Caldecott vote and in two (!!) short weeks, the Real Committee will announce their choices for the 2025 Caldecott Medal and Honors.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
hbook.com | Cathryn M. Mercier |Megan Lambert |Adrienne L. Pettinelli
Teach learns to read alongside his master’s son and transfers this knowledge through forbidden tutorials to enslaved men, women, and children. Lesa Cline-Ransome’s free verse narrative in Teach’s hushed voice opens on Monday and closes with lifted voices at Sunday School. As the congregation reads the biblical lines “Let My People Go” that Teach has written on a slate held high by the preacher, their “songs rise out of whispers” to “fill the air with the sounds of freedom.” James E.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
hbook.com | Megan Lambert |Adrienne L. Pettinelli |Brian Wilson
A tall portrait layout might have been the natural choice for Noodles on a Bicycle, with its depictions of bicycling demae (deliverymen) who balance gravity-defying towers of trays and bowls of soba noodles as they move through the streets of Tokyo. Instead, Zhang opted for a square trim, which infuses her illustrations with a sense of stability.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
hbook.com | Megan Lambert |Lindsay Bayer |Jennifer Hubert Swan
Too Small Tola Makes It Count by Atinuke; illus. by Onyinye IwuPrimary, Intermediate Candlewick 96 pp. 9/24 9781536238150 $16.99e-book ed. 9781536240030 $16.99Atinuke returns for a fourth time (Too Small Tola, rev. 3/21, and sequels) to her diminutive, high-spirited, mathematically gifted protagonist’s “run-down block of apartments in the megacity of Lagos, in the country of Nigeria,” with its close-knit and quirky neighbors.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
hbook.com | Megan Lambert |Jennifer M. Brabander |Danielle Ford |Julie Hakim Azzam
Meena’s Saturdayby Kusum Mepani; illus. by Yasmeen IsmailPrimary Kokila/Penguin 40 pp. 10/24 9780593110317 $18.99e-book ed. 9780593110324 $10.99This captivating ode to weekly gatherings of friends and extended family brims with affection for foods, activities, and traditions shared by a loving, large group crowded together in the narrator’s home. Mepani revels in specific references to Gujarati Indian culture within an immigrant experience in an Anglophone country.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
hbook.com | Sylvia Vardell |Megan Lambert |Julie Danielson
Windsongs: Poems About Weather by Douglas Florian; illus. by the authorPreschool, Primary Beach Lane/Simon 48 pp. 5/24 9781665937726 $18.99e-book ed. 9781665937733 $10.99Kids are often hyper-aware of such natural phenomena as thunder, lightning, and snow, so a collection of twenty engaging, informative poems about weather is likely to be a hit.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
hbook.com | Sylvia Vardell |Megan Lambert |Julie Danielson
Grace Notes: Poems About Families by Naomi Shihab NyeMiddle School, High School Greenwillow 240 pp. 5/24 9780062691873 $19.99e-book ed. 9780062691897 $11.99Nye’s (most recently Everything Comes Next, rev. 1/21) latest collection of free verse poems is divided into two parts: “No Age Is Empty” and “Sometimes We Need a Bigger Family.” Her focus is on growing up and her own personal family circle, particularly her mother.
