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After taking a look at our selection of hot new releases and popular kids' books ... it's more than likely we're suckers for picture books about love, kindness, and compassion.

The Children’s Bookshow is an organisation that arranges an annual tour across England of children’s authors, poets and illustrators. It’s a fantastic opportunity to take entire classes to see an author, poet or illustrator live, with the added bonus that if you buy tickets to one of the Children’s Bookshow events, you will have the opportunity to book a free school workshop with an author/poet/illustrator. If you are successful in bidding for a free school workshop the Children’s Bookshow will gift the attending children a book to keep.

This year Bernardo Atxaga, Patrick Benson, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Benji Davies, Daniel Morden, Marie-Aude Murail, Catherine Rayner, Rachel Rooney, Michael Rosen, Jessica Souhami and Kit Wright are taking to the stage, everywhere from London to Leicester and Stafford to Snape Maltings. Events take place from September to November, but if you want to be sure of places for the kids you teach and in with a chance of winning a free author/poet/illustrator workshop, early booking is strongly advised.

Booking is now open and you can find full details at The Children’s Bookshow website: http://www.thechildrensbookshow.com/arts-award.html

One of this year’s participants in the The Children’s Bookshow is Rachel Rooney, shortlisted for the CLPE Poetry Award. In conjunction with The Children’s Bookshow Rachel is running a super poetry competition for kids (9 and under, and 9-11). You can find out full details here:
http://www.thechildrensbookshow.com/competition.html

Heath McKenzie | The Children’s Book Review | May 18, 2015 Heath McKenzie has illustrated numerous picture books and children’s book jackets. He lives with his wife and kids in Melbourne, Australia. Latest published book … My Rules For Being A Pretty Princess You wrote it because … …at the time, my wife and I were expecting our first […]

Title: The STORM WHALE Written and illustrated by: Benji Davies Published by: Henry Holt and Company, LLC., 2013 Themes/Topics: whales, loneliness, father/son relationships Suitable for ages: 3-7 Fiction, 32 pages Opening: Noi lived with his dad and six cats by … Continue reading →

On Sudden Hill – Review + Q&A with Linda Sarah & Benji Davies.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mama-writer friends. What you do every day is amazing! You created kids…and now you create stories!

And what I just did is amazing, too. I gave birth to a new book cover!

(Well, really, Benji Davies did.)

I THOUGHT THIS WAS A BEAR BOOK releases in August 2015 from Aladdin/Simon & Schuster. But you can catch a glimpse of the alien-bear mayhem right here, right now:

Many thanks to my very cool editor, Alyson Heller, and art director, Karin Paprocki, at Aladdin. And of course, none of this would be possible without über-agent Ammi-Joan Paquette.

More sneak peeks to come soon. I promise you a cute bear tushy.

Have a great day, Mama Bears!

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious does not even begin to describe the week I’ve been having! I know, I know, why should YOU care? Frankly, I don’t know. The fact that anyone other than my mother reads this blog blows my mind.

First, on Friday, my agent said she loves the 900-word picture book I just wrote. Who knew that many words was possible? I tend to stick to the 500-is-best rule, but this story was too ambitious to fit in such a tiny space. So it’s busting out into the world and I hope it writes home soon. Au revoir, dahlink!

Next, I spoke at the RUCCL One-on-One Plus conference. And people thanked me for my speech! To know that I helped a few mentees feel less nervous that day—whoa! Mission accomplished.

And now, I have an announcement!

Drum roll please….

Oh, you’re an animal, Animal!

I have an illustrator for I THOUGHT THIS WAS A BEAR BOOK (Aladdin/S&S, 2014)!

And he is full of awesome sauce! (Although he’s from the UK, so that might be called “admirable gravy” across the pond, I dunno.)

Without further ado (and I do a lot of ado), it’s…

(No, that’s not Benji in the picture. Although I think that may be me on a non-showering day.)

Benji is the admirable gravy behind such books as DINO PARADE and HODGE THE HEDGEHOG (which I mistakenly thought was about John Hodgeman), plus the delightful interactive book app series from Nosy Crow, BIZZY BEAR.

So can you tell I’m absolutely tickled to have him working on my book?

This is one of the most exciting parts of being a picture book author—finding out who your illustrator will be and falling in book love. (Not to be confused with marriage love, as I am already taken by a dashing computer geek. And yes, you can use the words “dashing” and “computer geek” in the same sentence. Although to the computer geek, it may have a programming connotation.)

So check out Benji’s work, congratulate him, and also give him fair warning that he’s working with an absolute nut. He may require counseling after the book launch.

After all, I called him “admirable gravy”!

I’ve become a bit of a board book connoisseur in my old age.  While my cohorts are reading speculative YA fiction and high end narrative nonfiction I’ve been getting up close and personal with books that have pages that can double as coasters.  Aside from realizing just how difficult the darn things are to write (darn hard, she said cleanly) I’ve noticed that board books just don’t get a lot of credit on the interwebs.  There are no board book blogs.  No board book Goodreads Groups.  No hashtags for #boardbooklove or #boardbookwarrior (there are hashtags for #bbforever but they have nothing to do with titles for tots).  With all this in mind, I think there’s room enough in the universe for a post about some of the board books we’ve seen this year so far and what they have in their favor.  Cause when you read something 500 times, you’re either going to go insane or you’ll internalize it to the point where it’s the most fascinating thing you’ve ever read.  In the latter (or is it former?) category:

Bizzy Bear: Off We Go by Benji Davies – So here’s the deal with Bizzy Bear.  On the outset, I wasn’t impressed.  I got some of these books sent to me by Candlewick and give them this sort of cursory glance.  They star a bear.  He’s British (a fact you’ll notice in a couple of the driving scenes).  The most striking thing seemed to be that you could move things or lift things with these strangely sturdy little circle cut outs in various pictures.  So I brought some home for the small fry and didn’t think much of it.  Fast forward three months and I’m part of the unofficial Yanks for Bizzy Bear Fan Club.  I can even pinpoint where the change of heart occurred.  It all comes down to Bizzy Bear: Off We Go.  The plot, such as it is, concerns our titular bear as he hops a cab to a train to a plane to a vacation where he rounds out the story with a lovely lass he must have picked up mere moments after arriving (well played, bear).  I read this book quite a few times, impressed with its ability to stand up to a baby’s beating.  There must be some superior form of cardboard at work on this puppy since Bizzy take a licking and keeps on ticking.  But it really wasn’t until we got to an image of a roundabout that my mind was blown.

The set-up shows a little roundabout with traffic moving.  There are trees on the left and right sides of the roundabout and the traffic sort of disappears under them.  Turn a little wheel on the right and the traffic circles around the roundabout.  Simple, no?  I’m ashamed to say that it probably took me thirty-some readings of this book before I realized something strange. Normally when a baby book contains wheels that turn n’ such the characters appear rightside up and then upside down.  It’s a circle, after all.  Not so with Bizzy Bear.  By some miracle of modern construction there must be two separate wheels at work that make it so that the characters never appear upside down.  It has been all I could do to keep from tearing my child’s beloved book into shreds in order to figure out what the internal logistics where of something that many parents won’t even notice.  All the books in the series work (and, thanks to their poundability, are perfect for library collections) but this is the one that truly has my heart.  Head over to There’s a Book and you can see a video of some kids putting Bizzy Bear through his paces.

14 Comments on Board Books 2012: What Works. What Doesn’t., last added: 4/23/2012