Publisher Spotlight Preview: Fall/Winter 2024 (Walker Books Australia, Black Sands, and Kalaniot

All right, everybody. Who wants to hear about more and more and more future books coming out? I guarantee you’re going to see titles on today’s list that you’ve never heard of before. Some will be strange. Some will be wild. All of them sound interesting to me (if they didn’t, I wouldn’t discuss them). Thanks to Ellen Myrick, I’ve gotten a peek at a slew of children’s books slated to come to our American shores in the not-so-distant future. So buckle up and enjoy the ride!

I know it looks like the Candlewick image (Candlewick being a Walker Books company) but this is actually the Australian wing of Walker Books. As such, they’ve some tasty treats of their own coming to the States, including…

Color Makes the World Go Round by Christopher Nielsen

ISBN: 9781760659424

On shelves October 1, 2024

I can’t be the only one who reads that title and hears the voice of Joel Grey singing it. In any case, this is a clever consideration of color. On one page you’ll see a beautiful color image while on the other you’ve something black and white. Add in a cheeky zebra (every picture book is vastly improved by the presence of cheeky zebras) and you have yourself an ideal readaloud for a 2025 Summer Reading Themed “Color Our World” early storytime.

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Jelly-Boy by Nicole Godwin

ISBN: 9781760659349

On shelves August 6, 2024

A cautionary tale. You know when you’re young and you fall for a guy that your family just cannot stand? Then you run away with him and realize that maybe they were right the whole time? So when jelly girl sees a mysterious jelly boy who’s not like the other guys, she instantly falls for him. Her family doesn’t like him and says that he’s dangerous but she follows him anyway. This turns out to be a huge mistake. As you can tell, her boy is clearly a plastic bag and by following him she gets swept up into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Don’t worry, folks, her family rescues her, but the book carefully treads that line between what is funny and what is scary. Plus there’s great backmatter that is very kid-friendly, which can sometimes be a rarity. As someone who serves on my library’s Blueberry Award committee each year, this is precisely the kind of title we try to keep an eye peeled for.

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So this publisher is of particular interest. Its founders were actually on Shark Tank and managed to win an investment. Their pitch? They wanted to see more diversity in comics, particularly a lot of YA that’s pre-colonization. These next books aren’t YA, but they’ll give you a good feel for the titles they like to produce:

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Cosmic Girls by Manuel Godoy

ISBN: 9798989884100

November 30, 2024

Meet Corina. She’s thirteen. She’s a war orphan. And now she’s a bounty hunter for the United Empire of Earth with a wisecracking alien sidekick named Durasi at her side. As someone who’s perpetually on the lookout for science fiction in my children’s literature, I was particularly intrigued by some of these interiors. Take a gander!

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Black Sands Seven Kingdoms by Manuel Godoy and David Lenmand

ISBN: 9798988182870

On shelves November 30, 2024

If you’re getting some Avatar the Last Airbender vibes from this cover then you’ll be happy to know that that’s a pretty good comparison for this comic series set in the ancient kingdom of Kush (now modern Sudan). This series continues Black Sands’ mission to focus on tales that came before European slavery. Based on a legend, the story follows Ausar, a young boy with an unwavering ambition to rule Kemet. To do so, he has to handle both gods and humans, all the while visiting places like ancient Greece, Sumer, Canaan, Kush, and Egypt. Bonus: This series is supposed to have really good educator guides.

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Kalaniot Books

This last publisher (for today) was started in 2020 by a husband and wife who had already spent 30+ years at the big publishers. As you’ll see, they specialize not simply in Jewish tales, but in beautiful ones at that:

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Uri and the King of Darkness: A Hanukkah Story by Nati Bait, ill. Carmel Ben Ami

ISBN: 9781962011983

On shelves October 22, 2024

Man, it has gotta be tough to be an anxious kid in this day and age. This particular book just sort of drills that home for me. Essentially, it’s a Hanukkah story about owning the night and fighting for the light and the good. But all that is done in the context of Uri as he waits for his father to get home at the end of a long day. While waiting, Uri and his sister fight the titular King of Darkness himself. Word has it that this book contains a lot of great backmatter, and if you know me then you know that those are the magic words! I also like that the evil king looks like nothing so much as Beekle’s evil twin.

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A Turkish Rosh Hashanah by Etan Basseri, ill. Zeynep Ozatalay

ISBN: 9781962011976

On shelves August 6, 2024

Now maybe your library is full of books focused on the Jewish New Year traditions of Sephardic Jews from Turkey, but as far as I’m concerned this is definitely the first book published in America, that I’ve encountered, to do so. In the story, Rafael and his cousins work together to shop in Istanbul’s marketplace for their family’s Rosh Hashanah celebration. Anyone who has ever tried to put together a Rosh Hashanah display of children’s books has probably discovered the sheer lack of them on our shelves these days. This title is definitely one of the few then. Additionally, it includes elements of Ladino, the language that is a combination of Spanish and Hebrew spoken by many Sephardic Jews in Turkey​. Pretty cool!

That’s all the titles I have time for today, but stay tuned as I work my way through about twenty-eight more publishers in the coming months. Until then, happy reading!

Filed under: Publisher Previews