31 Days, 31 lists: 2024 Caldenotts

What precisely is a “Caldenott”? Put simply, it is any book where the illustrator is inconveniently from a country other than America. Why does that matter? Because, best beloved, the Caldecott Award (given to the most distinguished illustrated work for children every year) can only go to people who either reside in the United States of America or are residents. A Caldenott is a book that for all intents and purposes should win, but cannot because its creator doesn’t fall into our rigid requirements (and if you buy me a drink I’ll expound on how this is inherently unfair because Canadians can serve on the Caldecott committee so why can’t they win the award itself… oh, never mind).

Today, we look beyond these rigid classifications and celebrate those artists that are deserving in every possible way save location.

You can find the PDF of the entire list today here.

Oh, and if you’re interested in previous years and their CaldeNotts take a gander at these:

• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016

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2024 Caldenotts

The Cat Way by Sara Lundberg, translated by B.J. Woodstein

Usually when the human and the cat go walking, the human decides what they should do and where they should go. When things flip, it’s the human who begins to see things in a whole new light. First off, it’s very satisfying to see a book where the main character knows how to hold a cat correctly on the cover. I also am intrigued by the fact that this is the rare picture book where an adult is the main character. There’s a funny surreal quality to this story, while at the same time the emotions are so real to me. It’s both telling its own story straight, while also feeling like it’s talking about a lot more than just the relationship between a woman and her cat. The art is fantastic, I love the gatefold (a rare three-page gatefold, no less!) and the simplicity of the telling. GREAT work by translator B.J. Woodstein, by the way! It really gets the tone of the book down just right!

Dive, Dive Into the Night Sea by Thea Lu

Black and white picture books don’t sell, they tell us. But aside from whether or not that’s even true, does it count as a black and white picture book if it’s punctuated with the occasional spot of yellow or even blue or red throughout? Any book that insists on being read horizontally has to justify its choice. And a book in which a person deep sea dives into the sea at night would certainly count. Thea Lu is a Shanghai-based author/illustrator but from what I could tell, this book was originally published in the States. It’s also one of those books that has a younger text on the one hand, and an older one for kids who need more information on the other. Where do you find this older text? Under flaps! Not only are you holding this book in such a way where you’re turning the pages upward, but occasionally there’s a flap to turn. It gives the entire endeavor the feeling of a kind of informational treasure hunt. There’s even information here that I’ve never encountered in other books for kids before, like the fact that sperm whales drift vertically near the surface when they sleep and that the kind of sleep they do is called “unihemispheric sleep” (so that they can control their breathing). Does that mean that this book is one of the most creative of the year? Yes indeed. Not like any other out there, with a mix of fiction and nonfiction, yielding a pretty successful end result. And fun!

The Gale by Mo Yan, ill. Zhu Chengliang, adapted by Gu Xiaoxiao, translated by Ying-Hwa Hu

Having just turned seven, a boy is finally allowed to accompany his grandfather to work, cutting grass for their livestock. But when a massive wind hits them, will they both survive the trip? So the question we lay before you is this: Is this book by Mo Yan, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, appealing to kids at all? I can tell you this much, this book sticks in your brain. I mean, it’s an interesting tale I’ve never really seen before. It reminds me of that old Reading Rainbow book about the farmer whose plow accidentally falls into a hole that becomes an active volcano. Like that book, a farmer must face head on a natural disaster. Only in this case, it’s a real man vs. nature situation, and you don’t know who’s going to win. You might spend a fair amount of time yelling at this book, “It isn’t worth it, man!!!” Still, it doesn’t read like a translation, or even an adaptation, at all. It’s exciting and beautiful to look at. We get a lot of grandparent books in a given year but NONE of them are like this one.

Giant On the Shore by Alfonso Ochoa, ill. Andrés López, translated by Shook

When I go to the Bologna Book Fair (it isn’t all that often, but it’s happened three times so far) I’m always entranced by the picture books that other countries love as opposed to the picture books that we love. Giant On the Shore was a gutsy move to bring to America, but Transit Children’s Editions was willing to take that risk. Why “gutsy”? Because the book is entirely about what isn’t there. There’s a giant on the shore of a country, but it hasn’t come onto the land yet. In many ways, what follows are the thoughts of a child imagining all the ways that the giant could join the people and have fun here. But all throughout, the art never actually shows the giant. What it does show are the spaces that are giant created and giant shaped. A space between the trees. A huge footprint in the sand. Does the giant ever come to shore? The feet are last seen walking away, and the last silent images in the book are just sky and sea. It’s a sad little contemplative book. And, to be perfectly frank, we are in dire need of more sad little contemplative books in this country. Particularly if they sport art as beautiful as this. 

Griso the One and Only by Roger Mello, translated by Daniel Hahn

If ever there were a book this year for whom the term “unconventional” was perfectly coined, it would be this one. Roger Mello is just one of those folks who doesn’t like to do the same book twice. Or, in this case, like anyone else in the world. The idea behind this book sounds simple. You have a unicorn and that unicorn is searching the world for another like himself. He runs through surreal landscapes as Mello tries out a whole slew of different artistic styles. One minute Griso is recreating a Tang Dynasty mural and the next a Persian bas-relief. He might go through scenes based on Bamana ancient sculptures from Mali or woodcuts based on Brazilian chapbook literature. There’s not precisely what one would call a strictly “happy” ending to the book, but there is a satisfying ending, as Griso meets a winged horse, also the only one of its kind. As strange as this may sound, this may be one of Mello’s more accessible books for American kids. The style may change but the storyline is consistent, comprehensible, and I rather love the way it nails the ending. One could also have fun staring engrossed at the endpapers. They’re a yellow and black checkerboard pattern and they virtually vibrate off the page. 

Hiro: Winter and Marshmallows by Marine Schneider, translated by Vineet Lal

Do we talk enough about Belgian imports? I think not. I think, in fact, that we really don’t discuss them at all and this is a true pity. In spite of the fact that Marine Schneider has published a whole bear series with Abrams (Little Bear, Baby Bear and Big Bear, Little Bear respectively) she’s still a relatively new name to our American ears. Perhaps this book might change that a bit. In 2024 we’ve seen a slew of picture books examining the trend of winter animals disinclined to hibernate. That’s sort of understandable. Hibernation must sound to a child like the world’s longest nap, and who wants anything to do with that? Hiro the bear is very much of the same mindset. Warned by her family not to go out into the cold (“Winter makes your paws numb”) she perseveres and smells, of all things, toasted marshmallows. Some kids are having a bonfire party and you get this marvelous two-page spread of them all mid-party staring at you, the reader, who is also clearly the bear. This is followed by another wordless two-page spread of the kids fleeing and a third of the abandoned campground, red party hats sitting morosely in the slow around the embers of the fire.

Hiro’s a bit depressed about the whole thing, honestly, but happily one of the kids didn’t get very far and the two strike up a friendship. The text is a true delight of this tale with great lines like the one where the child asks, “What’s it like, being a bear?” and the considered answer is, “It’s as if the world were very small and very big, all at once.” In the words of the book itself, a “lovely and squishy and soft” kind of story. 

Home by Isabelle Simler, translated by Vineet Lal

From lofty aeries, to straw apartment complexes, to a grassy lodge just big enough for a mouse, dive into these sumptuous images and fun poetry about all the different homes created by the architects of the natural world. Simler likes to mix her poetry with her factual information, and this time her focus is on animal homes. Her art has always been her greatest lure, looking as it does like scratchboard art when it’s actually digital. The difference with this book is that I don’t know if it’s the translation, but I feel like the poetry itself is particularly strong this time around. Like with the bowerbird poem that reads, “At the blue hour, I shall make my entrance / to steal the heart of my beloved.” Of course my sole objection to the book (and it’s not alone in this) is including the bowerbird’s nest in a book called Home, since technically bowerbirds don’t live in the nests that they decorate (thank you, last year’s You and the Bowerbird, for that fact).

Kamau & Zuzu Find a Way by Aracelis Girmay, ill. Diana Ejaita

I like the term “modern folktale”. I particularly like the term “modern folktale about African diaspora, resourcefulness, and intergenerational love.” Most of all, I like a picture book where the emotions are not entirely resolved and the solution is not entirely there. If you are going to talk about people displaced from their homes and loved ones, with no recourse of return, how do you do that in a folktale setting? In the case of this book, baby Kamau and his grandmother Mama ZuZu wake up one day to find themselves on the moon. Naturally, since Kamau can’t remember his home from before, and he doesn’t miss it the way his grandmother does. For him, the moon has always been home. Now, about this point, reading the book you are assuming that it’s going to end with the happy resolution of everyone reuniting back on Earth at some point. Nope. And the writing? So incredible. At one point Mama ZuZu says, “But we will have to find a way to live, as people do,” and the next line is, “Something about the way she said ‘live’ always filled Kamau’s blood up with sun.” Is it any wonder the author is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund? Add in the truly beautiful art of Diana Ejaita (no word about her medium on the publication page, which is a crying shame) but this book is a jaw-dropper.

Loose Threads by Isol, translated by Lawrence Schimel

When Leilah decides to sew up the holes in her world single-handedly, she has no idea the consequences of such acts. A beautifully illustrated combination of needlework and hand-drawn characters. Because honestly, we need a little more international flavor in our early chapter books, and this fascinating little fable fits the bill. It’s probably one of the most inventive little titles you’ll see this year, too. The art is this eclectic mix of embroidery and illustration, all based on a scarf Isol received from the Palestinian women she visited at the Tamer Institute in Palestine. It’s also a great little tale of a girl trying to solve problems that don’t need solving. Makes for a nice complement to other stories about letting a few gaps and mistakes exist in our world, and the problems of striving for perfectionism. Or maybe it’s about something else entirely. I’m not sure! All I know is that I love this book.

A Star Shines Through by Anna Desnitskaya

“We left for another country. It’s not like home here.” A girl and her mother leave everything behind to start a new life. A beautifully wrought tale of immigration and finding home. A perfect pairing of art, tone, and writing. The scenes of the empty apartment that the girl and her mother enter are just pitch perfect. I was particularly taken with the acknowledgement that neither the mom nor her daughter are the same after that, but they find ways to make it work. The fate of the girl’s father is left unclear, which I also kind of appreciated. This is a hard one to forget.

Thank You, Everything by Icinori, translated by Emilie Robert Wong

Years ago, when my children were young, I used to read them a marvelous picture book called Issun Bôshi: The One-Inch Boy. It was everything I love about folktales. Gross, weird, with art that was supremely beautiful. Artist couple Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller publish together under the name “Icinori”, but I hadn’t really seen anything else they’d done in years. That all changed this year with Thank You, Everything. Don’t let the title fool you. While this may sound like one of those standard gratitude books that are particularly popular in library displays around Thanksgiving time, this book is much much weirder. It starts off fairly normally though. “Thank you, yellow. Thank you, red.” Let it be known that the “red” in this book is debatable. Personally, I think it looks orange, but one could argue that it was more an orangey red. The book thanks different objects, from pocket knives to trains. But then a plot starts to emerge out of the ephemera. About the time our hero and their doppleganger are escaping from an exploding volcano, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. Supremely lovely, this is the kind of book a kid could pore over for long periods of time, immersed in this beautiful world. How else could I possible conclude this write-up, except to say, thank you, Icinori! 

Tove and the Island With No Address by Lauren Soloy

Trust the Canadians to bring us an evocative, odd variation on the young life of Tove Jansson. Inspired by the stories she wrote about her childhood, this book is just brimming with Moomin-inspired oddities (though it adheres a little more closely to our own standard storytelling requirements). In this tale, when she is seven, Tove and her family do what they do every year in Finland and spend the summer in a cabin on “an island with no address.” Free to wander the wilds, little Tove has a grotto where a “secret friend” abides. He’s small and shy and has five girls “as tiny as shells with hair as wild as seagrass, and he had no control over them at all.” One day, Tove offers to take the girls for a walk, but no sooner does she set out than the wind picks up and blows the girls away. There are some incredible shots of the sun peeking through the dark clouds in god rays as Tove, who is level-headed throughout, determines to get those girls back. Soloy’s art is just as evocative as her storytelling, and I’m probably not the only one who wishes that she could get some prints of this book to hang on her wall. The sky, man, the sky! Using her smarts and moxie, Tove gets the girls back and to their father (“he was proud of the girls for being so wild, but he did a good job of pretending to be disappointed”) and goes home to her own family where her mother wraps her in a big sweater and gives her piping hot pancakes covered in jam. This is unconventional if only because the combination of elements you find inside are like nothing anywhere else. At the same time, I can see a child getting lost in these pictures. While there is peril, there is never danger (does that makes sense?). A paean that Tove herself would approve of. 

We Go to the Park by Sara Stridsberg, ill. Beatrice Alemagna, translated by B.J. Woodstein

I like it when I flip a book so that I can read the publisher on the spine and the name that I read there is “Unruly”. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the Unruly imprint of Enchanted Lion Books specializes in adult picture books. Why include it? Technically, the Caldecott goes to illustrated books for children, but has no problem handing out Honors to YA graphic novels. This book, originally written in Swedish, is actually intended for a teen and adult audience, which makes a certain amount of sense. Of course, usually when publishers talk about picture books for teens they mean those treacly “graduation books” that come out like clockwork every spring. This? This is not that. I mean, if you really wanted it to be that you could probably justify it, and it would truly be a MUCH more interesting choice than, say, Oh, the Places You’ll Go. With a thick cardboard cover and marvelous endpapers that somehow manage to be both colorful and murky all at once, the book opens with two blank pages on which are printed the following words: 

“Some say we come from the stars, 

that we’re made of stardust, 

that we once swirled into the world

from nowhere.

We don’t know.

So we go to the park.”

And ostensibly it’s just a story about that. Going to the park. But there’s not much of a story at this park. If anything, this is a story that taps into the nostalgia that teens and adults feel when they look back at a time when going to the park was all that they wanted to do, as kids. This is punctuated by wordless spreads on a regular basis. Alemagna has eschewed her usual love of fluorescent colors, but again I wouldn’t call this subdued painting drab. It’s beautiful and a little muted, but never boring. The same could be said for the text. It feels translated but, at the same time, isn’t stilted in any way. “We don’t know much about what will happen next… just that the swings here launch us straight into the sky.” Lovely and odd.

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So with all that in mind, here are the other lists for 2024:

December 1 – Great Board Books

December 2 – Picture Book Readalouds

December 3 – Simple Picture Book Texts

December 4 – Transcendent Holiday Picture Books

December 5 – Rhyming Picture Books

December 6 – Funny Picture Books

December 7 – CaldeNotts

December 8 – Picture Book Reprints

December 9 – Bilingual Books for Kids

December 10 – Math Books for Kids

December 11 – Books with a Message / Social Emotional Learning

December 12 – Fabulous Photography

December 13 – Translated Picture Books

December 14 – Fairy Tales / Folktales / Religious Tales

December 15 – Wordless Picture Books

December 16 – Poetry Books

December 17 – Unconventional Children’s Books

December 18 – Easy Books & Early Chapter Books

December 19 – Comics & Graphic Novels

December 20 – Older Funny Books

December 21 – Science Fiction Books

December 22 – Fantasy Books

December 23 – Informational Fiction

December 24 – Gross Books

December 25 – Science & Nature Books

December 26 – Unique Biographies

December 27 – Blueberry Award Contenders (Celebrating the Environment)

December 28 – Nonfiction Picture Books

December 29 – Nonfiction Books for Older Readers

December 30 – Middle Grade Novels

December 31 – Picture Books

Filed under: 31 Days 31 Lists, Best Books, Best Books of 2024