Book Finder

Young Leo and his dad enjoy a day exploring nature, observing small creatures, and looking at trees and animals. Realistic illustrations and simple language enhance the shared joy.

Parents welcome their new little one, examining the baby’s face and describing its features in Spanish. Cozy illustrations and the welcoming narration conclude with a glossary (just in case it’s not clear from the images!).

Around the world, grandparents and grandchildren share everyday activities but most important of all, they share lots of love. Warm families are depicted in each color photograph in the latest addition of the Global Babies series.

A small dog and tiny cat are best of friends, playing all day, until one day Tao is hurt. George misses Tao very much until the friends are reunited, one with a bandage and gentler play. Simple but evocative illustrations complement the effective, brief narrative.

Tired of the same Old MacDonald’s farm? Add donuts and a greedy crocodile alongside a take-charge rooster and it’s a new tune! Silliness is the word (and picture) on this farm as children will sing along with the rousing E-I-E-I-O!

Following each rhyming clues is the animal that inspired various inventions such as snowshoes and water fins. More familiar inventions are followed by lift-the-flaps to intrigue or confound more sophisticated readers.

From purple lupines in Olympia (Washington) to pink “bleeding tooth fungus” in Maine’s Acadia National Park there are other vivid colors from nature that can be found in ten of the nation’s most visited national parks.  

One toddler thinks she can get dressed all by herself but winds up needing her sister’s help. In Muy verde! / Too Green!, another child is reluctant to try a new green soup but once he does, he wants more! Both attractive board books capture familiar experiences through cheerful, expressive illustrations and short text. Both books are available in bilingual (Spanish/English) editions.

Alma, first introduced in Alma and How She Got Her Name, is back! She plays with her cousins, snuggles with her mother, and more as she names her relatives. In Alma Head to Toe / Alma de pies a cabeza, she introduces all of her from her head to her soft heart. Both engaging books are in Spanish and English, sure to charm even the youngest reader.

Fefa struggles with words. She has word blindness, or dyslexia, and the doctor says she will never read or write. Every time she tries, the letters jumble and spill off the page, leaping away like bullfrogs. How will she ever understand them? But her mother has an idea. She gives Fefa a blank book filled with clean white pages. “Think of it as a garden,” she says. Soon Fefa starts to sprinkle words across the pages of her wild book. She lets her words sprout like seedlings, shaky at first, then growing stronger and surer with each new day. And when her family is threatened, it is what Fefa has learned from her wild book that saves them.

Most kids would do anything to pass the Iron Trial. Not Callum Hunt. He wants to fail. All his life, Call has been warned by his father to stay away from magic. If he succeeds at the Iron Trial and is admitted into the Magisterium, he is sure it can only mean bad things for him. So he tries his best to do his worst — and fails at failing. Now the Magisterium awaits him. It’s a place that’s both sensational and sinister, with dark ties to his past and a twisty path to his future. The main character in this adventurous middle grade fantasy has a limp that’s realistically present yet never overtakes the story.

Budding backyard scientists can start exploring their world with this stunning introduction to these flowery show-stoppers — from seeds to roots to blooms. Learning how flowers grow gives kids beautiful building blocks of science and inquiry.

Meet seeds that pop, hop, creep, and explode in this vividly illustrated introduction to the simplest concepts of botany. Learn about the many ways that seeds get from here to there, engaging children’s curiosity with strong action verbs. Clear photographs with fact-packed captions provide supporting details, explaining the role of seed features and functions in creating new generations of plants. Concludes with an illustrated glossary and back matter featuring more resources.

How many people actually know where chocolate comes from? How it’s made? Or that monkeys do their part to help this delicious sweet exist? Kids will learn that chocolate comes from cocoa beans, which grow on cocoa trees in tropical rain forests. But those trees couldn’t survive without the help of a menagerie of rain forest critters: a pollen-sucking midge, an aphid-munching anole lizard, brain-eating coffin fly maggots — they all pitch in to help the cocoa tree survive. Two wise-cracking bookworms appear on every page, adding humor and further commentary, making this book accessible to readers of different ages and reading levels.

In Manu National Park in Peru, an amazing fourteen different species of monkeys live together. That’s more than in any other rainforest in the world! How can they coexist so well? Find out in this lyrical, rhyming picture book that explores each monkey’s habits, diet, and home, illustrating how this delicate ecosystem and its creatures live together in harmony. From howler monkeys to spider monkeys to night monkeys, young readers will love getting to know these incredible primates and seeing the amazing ways they share their forest.

With the soothing rhythm of a bedtime story and the scientific wonder of a nature documentary, comes a celebration of the moon and all the creatures who rely on its light to find their way home. Under the glow of a shimmering moon, creatures great and small creep out of their dens, using its light to hunt, fend off predators, build their nests or build families. As the moon changes phases these animals adapt their behavior to match its waxing and waning — while human animals look on in wonder.

This is a book about dinosaurs. No it’s not. Dinosaurs are not allowed. Oh. This is now a book about avocados! Sorry. We deleted those too. Discover just what can happen when ideas are erased instead of expressed with this hilarious picture book romp that kids (and grown-ups) will want to read over and over again.

From fried dumplings to fortune cookies, here are the tales behind your favorite American Chinese foods. Do you know the stories behind delectable dishes—like the fun connection between scallion pancakes and pizza? Or how dumplings cured a village’s frostbitten ears? Or how wonton soup tells about the creation of the world? Separated into courses like a Chinese menu, these tales — based in real history and folklore — are filled with squabbling dragons, magical fruits, and hungry monks. This book will bring you to far-off times and marvelous  places, all while making your mouth water. 

Alice loves to imagine herself in the magical pages of her favorite book. So when it flaps its pages and invites her in, she is swept away to a world of wonder and adventure, riding camels in the desert, swimming under the sea with colorful fish, floating in outer space, and more! But when her imaginative journey comes to an end, she yearns for the place she loves best of all.

A children’s story that teaches about respect for nature, animals and culture. After a Tlingit mother gives her son a dried piece of salmon with mold on the end, he flings it away in disgust, committing a taboo. This offends the Salmon People, who sweep him into the water and into their world, where the name him Shanyaak’utlaax or Salmon Boy. It comes from an ancient Tlingit story that was edited by Johnny Marks, Hans Chester, David Katzeek, and Nora and Richard Dauenhauer. Illustrated by Tlingit artist Michaela Goade.This book is part of the award-winning Baby Raven Reads, a Sealaska Heritage program for Alaska Native families with children up to age 5 that promotes language development and school readiness. Winner of the 2018 American Indian Youth Literature Best Picture Book Award.

Based on the real journal kept by French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1534, Ethis book imagines a first meeting between a French sailor and a Stadaconan fisher. As they navigate their differences, the wise animals around them note their similarities, illuminating common ground. Encounter is a luminous telling from two Indigenous book creators that invites readers to reckon with the past, and to welcome, together, a future that is yet unchartered.

As she waits for the arrival of her new baby, a mother-to-be gathers gifts to create a sacred bundle. A white feather, cedar and sage, a stone from the river … Each addition to the bundle will offer the new baby strength and connection to tradition, family, and community. As they grow together, mother and baby will each have gifts to offer each other. Two Indigenous book creators bring beautiful words and luminous art together in a resonant celebration of the bond between mother and child.

What if a school’s mascot is seen as racist, but not by everyone? In this compelling middle-grade novel in verse, two best-selling authors tackle this hot-button issue. In Rye, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, people work hard, kids go to school, and football is big on Friday nights. An eighth-grade English teacher creates an assignment for her class to debate whether Rye’s mascot should stay or change. Now six middle schoolers — all with different backgrounds and beliefs — get involved in the contentious issue that already has the suburb turned upside down with everyone choosing sides and arguments getting ugly. Told from several perspectives, readers see how each student comes to new understandings about identity, tradition, and what it means to stand up for real change.

On the night of November 20, 1969, eighty-nine young Native American activists crossed the San Francisco Bay under cover of darkness, calling themselves the “Indians of All Tribes.” Their objective? To claim the former prison island of Alcatraz, basing their actions on an 1868 treaty that said abandoned federal land could be returned to Indigenous peoples. Taking a stand on an island reclaimed as “Indian Land,” these peaceful protestors brought worldwide attention to the issues facing present-day Native Americans, as well as the centuries of unjust federal Indian policy.