Calling all wannabe ballerinas! If you’re headed to a girl’s birthday party this month, you must give this irresistibly charming (and seasonally appropriate) new book, Vampirina Ballerina (Ages 3-7), by Anne Marie Pace, with pictures by LeUyen Pham. This book has everything ballerinas-in-the-making (and their supportive parents) would want in a book: tutus, pirouettes, a Swan Lake-inspired recital, encouragements about practice and effort (as opposed to perfection), and a subtle but poignant message about accepting someone who looks different. In addition, this book has something most people d ..read more

Last week, I told you about my favorite new picture books for spooky season. Today, I’m turning the spotlight on a range of graphic novels, targeting emerging readers to middle-grade readers (up to 13). As the books increase in reading level, they also increase in spookiness. And, trust me, this is welcome news. Horror continues to be the fastest growing genre for kids. I’ve written previously about why kids have always been attracted to the macabre—and why this is actually very healthy. As this particular generation of kids continues to wrestle with coming of age amidst great uncertainty and ..read more

It has been another banner year for spooky (in some cases, “spooky”) picture books, and once again, I could not pick a favorite. In fact, I might like this bunch even better than last year’s, and that is high praise! This has officially become my favorite time of year to work at a bookstore. Some people delight in dressing up; I delight in dressing up displays of Halloween books. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kids today don’t know how good they have it! (I hope that if you’re local, you’ll come see me at Old Town Books, where I’ll be working our Spooky Town Books event on Saturda ..read more

October is a mere three days away, and I hope you’re welcoming it with a new book…or six. Winter might be the obvious choice for squirreling away with a pile of new reads, but the publishing industry would disagree. September and October are when the biggest bounty of titles release. It’s not just that the winter holidays are right around the corner: the subject of fall itself, both its formidable foliage and its singular spookiness, remains a favorite of authors and illustrators to depict. You have only to glance at the covers of the two picture books above to remember why fall is such a fan ..read more

“H—A—double L—O—W—double E—N spells Halloween!” Anyone else remember learning that song in Kindergarten? Anyone else still need to sing it to remember how to spell the holiday? Just me? Most years, I do you a solid and highlight just one stellar new Halloween picture book. This year, I couldn’t choose so you’re getting seven (sorry, not sorry). Actually, one of them—Oliver Jeffers’ There’s a Ghost in This House—you’ve seen before. It came out last year but, due to supply chain issues, juuuussst missed a Halloween release. That meant it made my Gift Guide instead—I mean, a haunted house is a h ..read more

2021 has seen many trends in children’s literature (body positivity and consent will make an appearance in next week’s blog post), but most fun is the onslaught of witches, ghosts and vampires, particularly in graphic novels. I’m not sure how to account for this uptake in supernatural activity on the page, except that maybe the last two years already have us feeling like we’re suspended between real life and an alternate universe. Magic has always been irresistible to kids—long before Harry Potter arrived on the scene, I can recall my own childhood obsession with The Blue-Nosed Witch—but perh ..read more

After hitting the snooze button on Halloween last year while in temporary housing, we were extra-enthused to unbox our spooky decorations last weekend—especially our Halloween books! (Do you pack up your Halloween books with the decorations so you can re-discover them every year? Trust me on this.) As my kids have gotten older, we’ve offloaded many seasonal picture books, and those left are the ones we can’t bear to give up. This includes old favorites like Creepy Carrots, Old Black Witch, The Monsters’ Monster, I am a Witch’s Cat, In a Dark, Dark Room…along with more recent favorites, like T ..read more

In the past seven months, many of us have learned to move with a new heaviness in our body. It’s the extra weight of uncertainty and anxiety, of mask wearing and hyper-vigilance. We may not be able to see it, but it’s there. We find evidence of it in the new depression in our sofa cushions. We find evidence of it in our interrupted sleep patterns, our bizarre dreams, or the way we take an extra day or ten to return emails. Our kids feel it, too, even when they’re not slogging through school on screens. How many of us have struggled to push our kids out the door—Go ride your bike!—only to be m ..read more

Shhhhh. The final post for my 2018 Gift Guide is here, but I don’t want my husband to know. (And not just because he would like me to start doing things around the house again—sheesh.) You see, I’ve written to Santa and asked him to put this book into my husband’s stocking. (And not just because the kids would fight over it.) If there was ever a guaranteed Christmas Morning Crowd Pleaser, this book is it. I simply cannot wait to read this (oh right, let my husband read this) to our group as the tissue paper flies. Mwahahaha! Adam Rex is hands down one of the cleverest and funniest contemporary ..read more

When my kids were younger, there was a nearby house which went all out in the weeks leading up to Halloween. I have never seen anything like it; rumor has it the entire second floor was dedicated to storing the decorations during the other eleven months of the year. There was no discernible theme. It was simply a collection of macabre paraphernalia thrown together on a front lawn: dark hooded figures wielding axes; skeletons with gaping eye sockets; dismembered body parts robotically twitching. For young children, I thought it would have been repulsive at best, terrorizing at worst. Instead, m ..read more