Book Finder

Jackie loved to pitch baseball. Her long practices paid off when at 17-years old she pitched for the Chattanooga Lookouts in a demonstration game against the New York Yankees. Jackie struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig — and forever changed baseball’s rules. The excitement of Jackie Mitchell’s story is well-paced, illustrated with slightly exaggerated and altogether winning illustrations.

After years in his home, Mitchell, a dinosaur, builds a new house and plans to move. But Margo, his friend and neighbor, just doesn’t understand. Humorous illustrations combine with a familiar theme for a rollicking story.

Through the observations of one young girl, the scents and sounds, the dazzling colors, and the breathless anticipation of a parched cityscape are vividly evoked during the final days before the welcome arrival of a monsoon in Northern India.

A hermit crab is looking for the perfect home. He does ultimately find it, though getting there is what makes the fun. The comic illustrations add to the humor in this rhyming, cumulative look at the crab’s move out and up.

The creator of this book visited the Inagua National Park in the Bahamas to tell a dramatic story of how the elegant pink flamingos live, thrive, and even survive a hurricane on their protected island home. Dramatic paintings and a vibrant narrative will inform and inspire young readers.

The essence of animals is evoked in rich language and the short form of haiku poems in this engaging book. Coupled with breathtaking and well composed illustrations, the poems are dramatically placed on double page spreads.

A young mouse digs in his heels while his mother is packing up their house for the inevitable move. Adults and children will see familiar behavior when the small mouse insists that he’s not going. The satisfying conclusion makes this book especially helpful.

Owen’s neighbor thinks that Owen is getting too old to take Fuzzy, his beloved yellow blanket, to kindergarten. With a snip, however, Owen’s inspired mom comes up with a creative solution for all.

Baby knows that Jut-Ay means morning has come, and it’s time to play. But where is Baby hiding? Eechy-eechy-egg! crows the red-tailed rooster. Is Baby near? Hru-hruu! Hru-hruu! whines the puppy dog. Is Baby crouching there? Hornbill and snake, elephant and tiger – who can finally lead Papa to Baby’s hiding place?

Ramona is ready for the challenges of a new school — without her older sister. It’s a year of change for the Quimby family and if everyone else can adjust, so can Ramona. The normal challenges of family life come alive here with verve and humor.

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison uses more than 50 archival photographs, many of children, to take readers on a journey to remember “the narrow path, the open door and the wide road” to integration of American schools before and after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision in 1954.

A girl discovers things that are round, square, and rectangular in her urban neighborhood. A gently rhyming text and crisply lined illustrations reveal many things that are universally recognizable as well as others that come from the child’s Chinese background.

This boy’s curse begins when his teacher suggests that the “poetry of science” can be heard everywhere. From Moore to Frost, familiar poems are parodied and turned into science verse. Again art and illustration are inseparable as are the laughs in this offbeat look at science.

The Great Sphinx has amazed and intrigued since it was first created some 4,500 years ago. Those secrets that have been revealed, and others that remain cloaked in mystery, are the subject of this well written, handsomely illustrated, and thoroughly engaging book.

As advertisements go up announcing the arrival of the circus, children imagine the different acts on the sidewalks of their town. It’s a nearly wordless but richly imagined adventure.

From the architects’ plans to the tower’s completion, a New York skyscraper is created step by step. Clear text is presented on several layers of detail and is coupled with crisp, informative, full color photographs to document this fascinating process.

The I Spy books ask readers to use their sharp eyes to solve the rhyming riddles and identify the hidden objects on each page. The masterfully composed, intricate and crisp photographs are filled with readily recognizable images, just hidden out of sight.

What Susan does everyday is revealed in a simple, rhyming text and light-lined, colored pencil illustrations. What Susan does and how she behaves is what all children do but she does it using a wheelchair, revealed — without sentimentality — in the final spread.