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It’s official. Should I happen to leave New York City for any reason (I’ve been saying I would for years, but it’s gotta happen someday) and I work for a publisher I want to work for Chronicle Books. No, really. I don’t what it is about them, but I get a really good vibe off of that company. Maybe it’s the fact that they’re one of the few West Coast publishers you’ll find in the continental United States. They have that easy breezy San Francisco feel to them. Or maybe it’s just the tone of their books. Or the fact that they have been luring New Yorkers to their microclimates for years (hi, Tamra Tuller!). Whatever the case, it’s alluring.  And so, this season, are their books.

Skipping entirely past their adult section (where in 2014 you’ll encounter titles like “50 Ways to Wear a Scarf” and “The Cheesemonger’s Seasons”) as well as their YA titles, we dive into the children’s books where they bob and glint like so many pretty little jewels.

First up! Middle grade! Chronicle hasn’t done much with MG novels in the past, but they aim to change all that.  This is middle grade with a cover unlike any other out there (with the possible exception of Jenni Holm’s Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf). In The Meaning of Maggie by debut author and “award-winning copywriter” Megan Jean Sovern, the book follows Maggie herself. Self-described future President of the United Sates, Maggie Mayfield keeps a memoir of her life during the course of a year. Like Harriet the Spy without the guile, she’s an overweight heroine where that is not the point of the book in the least (name me five middle grade books where you can say the same . . . it can be done but it’s tricky). Unlike Harriet, Maggie sports a fun family, including a dad that loves Black Sabbath and family friends that are bikers. The crux of the novel lies in the fact that Maggie’s dad is diagnosed with m.s., and in fact a portion of the proceeds of this novel are to be donated to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Ms. Sovern’s own father had m.s. and passed away a couple of years ago. The book already has blubs from Kathi Appelt, Wendy Mass, and Walter M. Mayes. Always a good sign.

Here is what all middle grade novels about Hurricane Katrina tend to have in common: They are some of the only books out there to have relatively contemporary African-American characters in them… and the ALL have dogs. Seriously. With the exception of You Survived Hurricane Katrina (which is a series anyway), this has been true of St. Louis Armstrong Beach, Buddy and Ninth Ward. Now we’ve a new book entering the fray and it’s Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere by Julie T. Lamana. Starring Armani Curtis (a girl), it follows her from the happy days of turning ten to the horrors of the Katrina. It may be the only book in which the hero actually enters The Superdome, and she is indeed separated from her family for a time. This is a debut for Ms. Lamana, who was a reading and writing instructor in the Ninth Ward when Katrina hit. And yes, there is a dog, but it’s not a major part of the plot. Still there, though. There’s just something about Katrina and canines . . .

Now we turn our attention to picture books, and this one appears to be a collaboration between an Italian and a Frenchman. I know Davide Cali best for this year’s really delightful graphic novel 10 Little Insects, and in a recent Children’s Literary Salon featuring Carin Berger and Marc Boutavant, Mssr. Boutavant name checked Cali. Well, Cali has been paired with Benjamin Chaud, the fellow behind The Bear’s Song, which was entirely delightful. Together, they’ve created I Didn’t Do My Homework Because . . . which features a boy with amazing hair and sideburns that Elvis himself would envy. Impeccably dressed in a grey suit with matching red socks and tie, our young hero goes through an extraordinary number of excuses, one after another, to explain why his homework remains unfinished. Someone at one point said it reminded them of the book What Do You Say, Dear? by Sesyle Joslin of yore. Could at that.

Author Germano Zullo isn’t exactly a household name here in the States, but that’s not for lack of trying on the small press’s parts. Whether it’s Chronicle or Enchanted Lion bringing his stories over, he’s here. His latest, and perhaps most accessible, book to date is Jumping Jack, illustrated once again by fellow Swiss (and one-namer) Albertine. In this book a show-jumping horse has difficulty following through, so to speak. Fortunately he has a sympathetic jockey who is convinced he can get to the bottom of the problem.

Now here’s a cause for celebration: Aaron Reynolds and Jeremy Tankard are doing a book together! Mr. Reynolds, as you’ll recall, is responsible for the recent Caldecott Honor winner Creepy Carrots (amongst another bazillion gazillion books) and Jeremy Tankard is a genius who does not do enough books. Seriously, someone should just force the man to crank out the product. We deserve more Tankard, consarn it! Well, for now we’ll be happy with Here Comes Destructosaurus! (how can you not just love that title?) which features a raging monster. Only thing is, the narrator is talking directly to the monster, taking him to task for his mess. It doesn’t take much effort to see the monster/toddler parallels at work here. And naturally the ending is great. I should say that I actually laughed out loud when reading this, and I don’t always do that. Awesome.

Those who know me will know why, personally, I was very happy to see a new series coming out of author/illustrator Micah Player called Lately Lily: The Adventures of a Traveling Girl. Player, remember, was the one behind Chloe, Instead and has even been doing the odd Hilary McKay book jacket on the side. With Lately Lily we meet the daughter of journalists that travel all around the world. The media tie-ins are already in the works, including Travel Flash Cards and a little yellow suitcase that’s full of luggage tags, activity cards, sticker sheets, games & doodle ideas, etc. Though Lily will travel to different books in the series, these aren’t really excuses just to see the cities. Rather, the books concentrate on just how awesome travel itself is. An alternative to some of those flight picture books we’ve seen coming out lately, then.

We seem to be sliding down down into the youngest of ages, but that’s okay with me. In Taro Gomi’s The Great Day the man behind Everyone Poops shows us “a little boy just having an awesome day”. It’s simple, talks with simple sentences just showing the basics of a day, and has a kiddo in it that isn’t white. So, basically, the combination of brown-skinned kiddo and Gomi the genius is enough to sell it to me right there.

And for fans of the epitome of all board books Peek-a Who? we have an honest-to-goodness sequel on our hands. Peek-a Zoo! is also by Nina Laden and though she took a bit of a hiatus for a while, she’s back, baby. I know my kiddo was a big ole fan of Peek-a Who? when she was a little ‘un, so it’s nice to see more along those lines. Similarly, Laden will also be coming out with the madcap Daddy Wrong Legs (good title) where you have to pair legs to torsos of everything from frogs and gorillas to skeletons and humans.

If 2014 is notable for nothing else it will be notable for the huge SWATH of Coraline designers and creators who have suddenly all decided to go into the world of children’s books.  Here at Chronicle, author Sue-Ganz Schmitt and illustrator Shane Prigmore (who was the character designer of Coraline) are coming out with Planet Kindergarten. The first day of school is like any good holiday in that it doesn’t matter how many books already exist on the topic. There can always be more. In this fun take, Kindergarten is equated with space travel to another planet. Your teacher is the commander, your fellow students are aliens, it all makes sense. Ultimately our space-trotting boyo comes to have a great day, so that’s nice.

Okay. So I’ve been enjoying Britta Teckentrup’s books for years, particularly Animal 123 and Animal Spots and Stripes. In Candlewick’s catalog mention of her latest book Busy Bunny Days: In the Town, On the Farm, & At the Port they include two readalikes at the bottom of the page. One of these is Rotraut Berner’s In the Town All Year Round and the other is Around the World with Mouk by Marc Boutavant. Those are pretty accurate comparisons to what Teckentrup is working with here. Chock full of details, like a slightly more European Richard Scarry, what sets the book apart is that each of the three settings keep the exact same view of their town (or farm or port) but at different times of the day. Turn the page and it’s 7 a.m. Turn another and now it’s 10 a.m. Another and it’s 3 p.m. Add in a naughty badger who’s hidden (and up to no good) on every page and you have yourself a heckuva lot of fun. So cute!

Remember “Walter Was Worried” by Laura Vaccaro Seeger?  That was the book where words turned into characters’ faces, expressing various emotions in the process. I haven’t really seen anyone else do something similar in a while, but that was before I saw Cat Says Meow: And Other Animalopoeia by Michael Arndt. Basically the book takes words that make up animal sounds and turns them into animals. It’s sort of hopelessly clever.

Following up on the success of Round Is a Tortilla, author Rosane Greenfield Thong and illustrator John Parra tackle a different concept. Where Tortilla was all about the shapes, Green Is a Chile Pepper is a colors book from start to finish. Like Tortilla it rhymes (“Green is a chile pepper, spicy and hot. / Green is cilantro inside our pot.”) this is yet another very rare picture book featuring Latino kiddos. Lovely on the eye. Rhymes to boot.

While I wouldn’t actually go so far as to call it narrative nonfiction per say, At the Same Moment Around the World will act as a nice accompaniment to nonfiction units. Since it shows off the notion of time zones (but not with real kids – hence the fact that it’s not really straight nonfiction), the book follows the everyday activities of children around the globe. Each section begins with the very nice “At the same moment” and then goes on to say what time it is for that particular part of the world. What it ultimately reminded me of, more than anything else, was When It’s 6 o’Clock in San Francisco.

Then we get a little French. The Ultimate Book of Vehicles promises much with a title like that. Created by Anne-Sophie Baumann and Didier Balicevic, the book is part of a new Chronicle imprint for preschoolers called Twirl Books. Twirl describes itself as, “Straight from Paris, curated with legendary French flair.” I kind of love that. Just as I kind of love that this book is the first I’ve ever seen for kids that includes a breathalizer test in one of the spreads. I sort of think that makes for an ideal teachable moment. The interactive elements to the book are lovely, but to my mind it’s the rocket taking off in one of the spreads that makes the whole book worthwhile.

But the most innovative of the books we saw had to be, without any doubt, Presto Chang-o!: A Book of Animals Magic by Edouard Manceau. I might have a little trouble describing exactly what this book is. You see, little flaps (that are also parts of the picture) can be manipulated and moved in such a way as to make a raccoon into a cauldron, a lion into a flower, or a clock into an owl, etc. You’ll have to play with it for a while yourself before you quite understand what I’m saying. It’s not exactly a flap book. More a . . . twisty turney pieces book (no no. . . that doesn’t work either). Whatever you call it, it’s cool and entirely unlike any other book you’ve seen.

And that’s the long and short of it!  Many thanks to the good folks at Chronicle for showing us their wares.  2014 is shaping up to be a heckuva year.

Sometimes you just want to get your hands on some reliable nonfiction.  The other day I was in the office and we’d spread out the vast quantities of nonfiction samples we’d been sent from a variety of publishers (all of whom shall remain nameless).  And while some things were okay and other things were tolerable, so little of it was of the “Wow! Awesome!” variety.  It would be disheartening if we didn’t have folks like Lerner to fall back on.  And I’m not saying this to be all chummy with them.  I honest-to-goodness really like their books.  Are all Lerner books created equal?  Of course not!  But they fill gaps in my collection while at the same time providing books on subjects it would never have occurred to me to buy.  And it tends to be reliable.

So!  With that in mind, here’s how the Spring ’14 season is looking for ole Lerner Books these days.

First up, the Lightning Bolt Books series and their latest topic: “Animals in Danger”.  We’re talking Endangered and Extinct Bird, Endangered and Extinct Mammals, even Endangered and Extinct Invertebrates.  The lure is that a lot of these contain a heartening comeback story at the end of each book of some animal or critter that nearly went belly-up and then was saved at the last minute.  I know plenty of kids that have to do endangered animal units for school, so it seems to me this makes for a much needed topic and category.

Speaking of requests I hear a lot, this is one that I wish to high heaven would go away and yet it never will.  I’m talking about “character building” books.  Books that by dint of even being read will miraculously transform your child into a better person through their cheery texts.  Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad books of this ilk are assigned to children every day in schools.  So while I loathe and abhor them, I am infinitely grateful to Lerner for at least doing a couple decent ones on the topics we’re used to being asked for.  Case in point, the “Show Your Character” series.  They’re multicultural and act as a slightly older version of Stuart J. Murphy’s “The Way I Act” series.

So here’s the deal with Common Core.  I’ve nothing against it myself.  Just the way it’s implemented some of the time.  But even as I say that, there are aspects to CCSS that are difficult to deal with.  I’m thinking in particular of the areas that are required and need written material, but where there’s very little in the marketplace.  Particularly in the case of early civilizations.  Second and third graders are supposed to be learning about China or Mesopotamia, but where the heck is the series written at an earlier reading level?  Meet the new Searchlight Books series “What Can We Learn from Early Civilizations?”  Each book is written on a easier level than a lot of books out there, and they cover everything from how these civilizations influence us today to folklore beliefs associated with those civilizations.  Plus anything that touches on Ancient Egypt is all good with me.

In the biography part of the world, finding stuff on contemporary scientists is a bit slapdash.  The “STEM Trailblazer Bios” series covers a range o’ folks, from robotics developers to game designers.  And there are even some women!  I don’t usually write out all the titles when I cover a series, but in this case I’ll make an exception.  In this series you’ll find the books:

• Alternate Reality Game Designer Jane McGonigal
• Flickr Cofounder and Web Community Creator Caterina Fake
• Google Glass anId Robotics Innovator Sebastian Thrum
• iPod and Electronics Visionary Tony Fadell
• YouTube Founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim
• And FINALLY, after all these years, Astrophysicist and Space Advocate Neil deGrasse Tyson.  I’ve been waiting for a Tyson bio for years and years and the fact that no one has done one yet just baffles me.  Glad to see someone somewhere picked up the slack!

I’ll confess to you that in many ways this round-up is mighty NYC-centric.  Because New York kids care diddly over squat about monster trucks and rally cars, I have chosen not to mention series like the “Dirt and Destruction Sports Zone” series.  By the same token, kids in this city have a thing for fashion.  Go figure.  All the more reason then that they might like the “What’s Your Style?” series coming out.  Basically everything from boho to edgy to pretty to streetwear gets its own book.  Knowing next to nothing about fashion myself, I trust Lerner to do right by my kids.

Have you guys seen that Blue Apple Books series where you follow a single object, be it a sphinx or dino bones or an asteroid from discovery (or in some cases, rediscovery) to their place in museums?  How the Sphinx Got to the Museum is one such example.  Well full credit to the upcoming book Handle with Care: An Unusual Butterfly Journey, since it takes a similar, if distinctly more biological, trip.  Starting in El Boxque Nuevo in Costa Rica we see a place where farmers grow butterfly pupae.  Why?  To ship to museums around the world, of course.  What, you think those butterfly exhibits grow themselves?  Written by Loree Griffin Burns with photographs by Ellen Harasimowicz, we follow a single butterfly pupae, and then go through all the requisite butterfly lifecycle details.  In a market where all the butterfly books kind of blend together, this one’s going to stand out.

We all love the Scientists in the Field series, bar none.  I love that series.  You love that series.  But let’s fact it, they’re not the only scientists out there with books to their names.  Plastic, Ahoy! Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by Patricia Newman (photos by Annie Crawley) at first sounded nothing so much as Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion.  The difference is the focus.  In this book we follow a research expedition studying the accumulation of plastic in the Pacific.  Through this story we see a lot of prepwork, including how to live on a ship, sea sickness, cooking, etc.

I’m a big fan of children’s or teen books that do original research not found in adult titles.  It’s unclear to me, but this may fall into that category.  Secrets of the Sky Caves: Danger and Discovery on Nepal’s Mustang Cliffs is written by Sandra K. Athans.  The focus, however, is on her brother, Pete Athans, the mountaineer.  Pete’s the kind of guy who climbs Mt. Everest on a regular basis (seven times as of this post) but this book focuses on what happened when he decided to explore the caves of Mustang (pronounced moo-stang).  Apparently they’re near impossible to get into, located in remote Nepal.  In this book you get to see his discoveries including (and here I’ll quote the catalog text) “murals to ancient texts to human remains”.  And they say there’s nothing left to explore anymore . . .

When I was in high school I had an English teacher who let us in on a little secret.  Certain movements of the body could be translated to explain what a person was thinking or feeling (God only knows what this had to do with English literature).  He showed how showing a palm might mean one thing or where your eyes automatically go when you’re lying.  I felt like this was the secret to the universe and if I just knew all these secrets I could rule the world (or, at the very least, become the next Sherlock Holmes).  Sadly, there was no book I could find that explained these things.  Now Lerner has produced Every Body’s Talking: What We Say Without Words by Donna M. Jackson.  It is PRECISELY the book I wanted when I was young.  For librarians, this will be the world’s easiest booktalk.  Hey, kids!  Want to know how to effectively lie to your parents?  It’s all here!  My co-worker Amie, upon hearing about this book, pointed out that it might actually be of a lot of use to autistic kids or those on the spectrum, since decoding physical bodily clues make up a lot of their existence.  Smart thinking there.

So you know how I continually vow that I’m not going to report on any YA these days in these previews?  Well, that lasts just about as long as it takes to discover awesome YA nonfiction.  After that point I’m a puddle.  I melt.  I am helpless in the face of awesome YA nonfiction.  Probably has something to do with the fact that there’s so little of it to choose from.  Or, it could be that Lerner comes up with the BEST ideas for books.

Example A: The World Series: Baseball’s Biggest Stage by Matt Doeden.  The World Series has a century long history, so it’s fitting that there should be a book out there that looks into it in depth.  It covers everything from the wacky moments (“the bloody sock” may mean something to some of you) to the heroic ones.  Baseball on the field has pretty much remained the same over the decades.  But off the field?  The climate has completely changed for the players.  Watch the changes take place here.

Example B: Chasing the Storm: Tornadoes Meteorology, and Weather Watching by Ron Miller.  Ron, for the record, actually traveled with a group of storm chasers to figure out how they did their work.  We’ve tons of fiction in our collections that talks about storm chasers (the “Storm Runners” series by Roland Smith comes to mind) but very little in the nonfiction department.  This book shows you not only how to become a storm chaser, but includes information on things like making your own weather station in your backyard.  Nicely done.

Example C: When a big event takes place and you wonder which major publisher will produce the first really good title on the topic, Lerner’s usually the first to come to mind (check out how quickly they made a book about the latest Pope when he was named last year).  In Curiosity’s Mission on Mars: Exploring the Red Planet by (again) Ron Miller, the book looks at Mars from a cultural perspective.  Chock full of diagrams and images as well as mentions of past and future missions, this’ll make a nice little companion to books like Cars On Mars and other Mars-centric selections.

Example D: K-Pop: Korea’s Musical Explosion by Stuart A. Kallen.  This is one of those cases where you don’t notice a phenomenon until it’s pointed out to you.  If you’d asked me prior to the publication of this book to name the top South Korean performers out there, I would have been hard pressed to answer.  But there’s Psy and, of course, Rain (whom I think of every time I hear someone mention that current CW show Reign).  Historically The Korean War was how American soldiers with their rock and roll introduced the form to the nation.  Now it’s huge, and has a book of its very own.

Example E: Years ago I saw this great documentary of found footage called The Atomic Cafe.  Oddly, it was the very first place where I learned about the Bikini Islands and what we did to them post-World War II.  No books in school ever touched on the topic and no textbook mentioned it.  Now Bombs Over Bikini: The World’s First Nuclear Disaster has been written by Connie Goldsmith thanks in large part to a information that was just recently declassified.  Between 1948-1956 the United States released 67 nuclear bombs.  This is the book that discusses what happened and the accidents that occurred as a result.

Example F: Traumatic Brain Injury: From Concussion to Coma by Connie Goldsmith (who, for the record, is a nurse) is probably as timely as timely could be.  But this isn’t just another book about the wide and wonderful world of football related concussions.  This book has a much broader approach, looking at the science behind what a concussion is and the different types that occur.  Since 52,000 die each year from them (not including all the unrecorded traumatic brain injuries), 1.7 million Americans have been diagnosed with TBI each year.  This is the book that looks into what happens and why.

Okay.  Enough of that teen stuff.  Let’s get some firm footing in the world of children’s books instead.

There is a legend that surrounds the 18th-century composer Scarlatti (which, in and of itself, is a marvelous name).  The story says that his most famous melody was created after he heard his cat walk across the keys of his harpsichord.  Scarlatti’s Cat by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer (illustrated by Carlyn Beccia) follows the legend to its logical end.  Pulcinella is the cat in question and she dreams of playing her own compositions.  It’s not until the timely appearance of a mouse, however, that she gets her big chance.  There’s a nice twist at the end on who gets the cat after Scarlatti gives her away.  Cute and musical.

2014 appears to be the year of Mumbet.  Next year Harper Collins will produce the young reader’s edition of Founding Mothers: Remembering the Ladies by Cokie Roberts (illustrated by Diane Goode) and there is a brief mention made in that book of Mumbet, a woman I’d never heard of before.  Now in Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence by Gretchen Woelfle (illustrated by Alix Delinois) we hear her story.  In 1781 a slave in Massachusetts just named Mumbet went to court for her freedom (and her daughters’ for that matter).  The amazing thing is that she won the case!  Here’s her story.

In the past I’ve said that fairytales and folktales are the hardest books to find in a given year.  Well, thanks to the efforts of small publishers I no longer believe that to be the case.  Now I lament the lack of poetry on our shelves.  Poetry, good poetry, is danged hard to find so whenever I hear of something I take note.  Lerner has just started the Poetry Adventures series, and they’re kicking off with Brian P. Cleary’s If It Rains Pancakes: Haiku and Lantern Poems.  It’s a continuing series, so we’re bound to find more than just these, but they make for a good start.  The rules are clearly stated for each poem and the pictures keep things fun.

Laura Purdie Salas and Violeta Dabija paired together back in 2012 to make the soft and simple A Leaf Can Be . . .  Now they’re back with Water Can Be . . . which follows much along the same lines.  This goes through the roles water plays and since it’s incredibly simple (“Water can be a . . . Tadpole hatcher / Picture catcher”) it’s ideal for very early units on water.  Basically it does for water what Picture a Tree did for trees.  They’ve also paired with Water Aid, so that’s where some of the profits will go.

Poetry is hard to find.  Graphic novels?  Less so.  Yet I’m still amazed that more time isn’t spent trying to find great ones for the kiddos.  Granted, the good ones can take years and years to make.  Still, there are ways around that.  I was then very happy to see a new GN series coming out of Lerner.  Tao, the Little Samurai by Laurent Richard (illustrated by Nicolas Ryser) is basically a very young Naruto.  A boy who excels in pranks and jokes dreams of someday becoming a martial arts master.  My only question?  How do you pronounce the hero’s name?  Is it Tao or Dao?  Questions, questions . . .

We have lots of middle grade books featuring deadbeat parents, but it can be hard to find just the right balance between stupidity/slime and real affection for their kiddos.  The new series “The Berenson Schemes” by Lisa Doan (illustrated by Ivica Stevanovic) takes an interesting tack.  In Jack the Castaway a boy has two parents obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes.  Perfect.  Ideal for fourth graders, it reminds me of nothing so much as “The Unseen World of Poppy Malone” series (parent-wise anyway).  Oh.  And Jack ends up shipwrecked on a tropical island avoiding a shark.  So there’s that too.

Last but not least, here’s a smart idea for a very different fiction series.  Called “The Cryptid Files” these books by Jean Flitcroft, these stories are of cryptozoology, much as you’d find in Suzanne Selfors’ “Bigfoot Terror Tales”.  In each book (starting with The Lock Ness Monster) our heroine Vanessa globe trots trying to finds and prove that cryptids exist.

And that’s the long and the short of it folks!  Many thanks to Lindsay Matvick for sitting down with me and showing me her wares.  Here’s a long and nonfiction heavy 2014!