Okay, confession time. Initially today’s post was going to be about children’s books that feature photography. I had this whole speech planned about how Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen waxed eloquent on the subject (TWICE) while meanwhile the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art has opted to create an exhibit called CLICK! Photographers Make Picture Books from January 17 – June 7, 2026 (no word on whether or not The Lonely Doll will make an appearance yet). Then I counted up how many photography books I looked at this year that I considered list-worthy.

One, people. I counted one single solitary book.

Now Easy Books (also know as beginning books or early readers) often don’t get lists of their own because they can be a bit hard to find in a given year. Fortunately for us, 2025 produced a bumper crop of easy books! As such, I’m delighted to feature them. Whether they’re winning Geisel Awards or simply teaching children how to begin to love reading, these titles are well worth their own list this year.

For the full PDF of this list, you can find it here.

Interested in previous years? Then check out the following.

• 2024
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019 & 2019
• 2018 & 2018
• 2017 & 2017
• 2016 & 2016

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2025 Easy Books

FEATURED TITLE

The Letter Setters in BOP! by Ethan Long

Meet the letter setters! When they discover a massive bone, these mischievous pups will stop at nothing to get it for themselves. An entire tale told entirely one word per page! Oh, I LIKE this! Maybe partly because I know how hard it is to write a legitimately useful easy reading book. When I had young kids, we’d check out beginner and easy books from the library and consistently find them too difficult for the kids’ reading levels. Ethan Long has now somehow tapped into the perfect storyline to accompany this tale told entirely in single words. And best of all? When you get to the end, the different setters each have short three-letter names that have different vowel sounds. A masterclass in simplicity.

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A Fairy Finds Her Song by Bea Jackson

Sometimes I forget how much I liked fairies when I was a kid. In fact, I distinctly remember learning to read in school with a story about a fairy and her wand. I hadn’t thought of those old readers in years, until I came across Bea Jackson’s book. I like an easy book with a bit more going on in its pages, and this author somehow manages to create a rather complex tale of a fairy trying to find her gifts. Okay, so first and foremost, I loved the range of skin tones and body types in the other fairies. They aren’t all lithe, wispy gals, since some of them have friggin’ awesome muscles! Also, look at the care and attention Jackson gives to their hair. In fact, all the art in this book is just a delight to page through. The environments do lovely things with light, shadow, and landscapes. And I might be extrapolating a bit too far, but there are certain scenes in here where the fairy Lily poses in mighty similar positions to the classic Cicely Mary Barker flower fairies of days of yore. I would have eaten this book right up as a kid, and I’m sure kids today are bound to feel the same way. 

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Hide & Seek with Clyde & Monique: Clyde in Plain Sight by Graham Annable

Ready for an epic game of hide-and-seek? Help Monique find Clyde. Hint: You might be better at this game than Monique is. Graham Annable. Is there anything that guy can’t do? There are so many methods for tackling easy books out there and I think Annable opted to make his book simple in its story and language, but to fill the art with a hidden Clyde in a lot of the pictures. I have a natural delight in Annable’s style, and while I wouldn’t categorize this as a beginner book, I think it works pretty well for the kids that already have a bit of a grasp on the language. 

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I Dance by Diana Rañola, ill. Christine Almeda

I got very excited when I saw this particular book, and for reasons both personal and professional. On the professional side of things, an easy book title in the Holiday House “I Like to Read” genre is always welcome, but particularly when the book focuses in on something as interesting as a wide range of Filipino dances. With infinitely simple words, the dances in this book include, “tinikling (bird dance), itik itik (duck dance), tahing baila (fish dance), dinyu-a (giving thanks), jota de Manila (dance with sound), malong (dance with cloth), subli (dance with hat), pagapir (dance with fan), and cariñosa (dance with a friend).” Almeda keeps the images fairly simple, but the dances themselves are recognizable (I recognized some, like the tinikling from YouTube). I’ve just never seen such an eclectic and interesting use of the easy book format. Of course, Holiday House always makes their “I Like to Read” books full-sized, causing children’s librarians across the country to lament because our short shelves won’t let us shelve them along with the other beginning books. And what’s my personal reason for loving this? I’ve a new baby niece this year with Filipino heritage and I am always searching for books for her. This one? Perfect. 

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Lone Wolf Goes to the Library & Lone Wolf on Vacation by Kiah Thomas, ill. K-Fai Steele

Lone Wolf is back, and whether he’s trying to spend a vacation solo or trying to avoid children at the library, he really only has one goal: To be LEFT ALONE! Misanthropy has never been so funny. I mean, this would be a harder choice for today’s list if Thomas & Steele were less good at what they do. A colleague of mine pointed out that these books are great examples of problem solving for kids. After all, Lone Wolf is constantly solving the problem of how to avoid anyone and everyone for as long as possible. This is not the kind of series where the hero will suddenly realize he wanted to be around people all along (a common trope in picture books). If I had to choose a favorite amongst these two books I might go with “On Vacation” if only because it sticks the landing a little harder. But then I remembered the snotty nosed child and The Stern Librarian in the library book and … awwww. I can’t resist that one either. And even better? These may be even better than the original two books in the series from last year.

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Mouse and Spoon: Owlets and Tarts by Cynthia Rylant, ill. Janna Mattia

Doggone it. Why is Cynthia Rylant still, and after all these decades, the reigning queen of all things easy reading? I legitimately want to know how she does it. Many authors start off strong and then, over time, their skills slow down. She’s just rubbing it in our faces, I think. Showing us just how good these books can be while, at the same time, doing it better than everyone else. This is one of several books in the “Mouse & Spoon” series released this year (so look for The Elephant’s Birthday and Rabbit Tea as well), but it’s 100% my favorite. In this tale, an owl couple needs a very specific kind of dessert for their three, perpetually awake children. Rylant has this somewhat bizarre, but enviable, ability to put you into a world where all the internal rules are already perfectly in place. Illustrator Janna Mattia, meanwhile, truly comes into her own and serves as the latest great artist to pair with Rylant’s gentle wordplay.

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Ride the Riverboat (Duck and Cat) by Drew Panckeri

What could be more relaxing than a riverboat ride that comes with dinner and a show? But things get a little tricky when three hungry crocodiles, who happen to be fellow passengers, turn their sights on Duck and Cat. The crew may have quit, but it’s gonna have to be showtime or Duck and Cat will be dinnertime! A distinctly James Marshall vibe permeates this particular book. It’s fairly simple in its words and plotting, but there were parts of it that really struck me as funny. First off, there’s a good, but not excessive, use of vomit. Then too there’s lines like this one from the nonchalant captain, steering the ship and told to do something about the hungry crocodiles. “I am doing something. Steering this ship. This sounds more like a you problem than a me problem.” It has proactive protagonists who find a clever solution (the recipe book’s recipes are a small in-joke in and of themselves). A surprisingly droll little affair. 

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Squid in Pants by Kaz Windness

[Previously seen on the Rhyming List]

Oh, Squid in Pants. How did you fly under my radar for so long? The name Kaz Windness perhaps sounds familiar for any number of reasons. You may know her from her TikTok videos, where she has become one of the great anti-AI activists. You may know her from her truly extraordinary (and Geisel Honor-winning) Worm and Caterpillar Are Friends. Now she turns her eyes seaside and part of what I really admire about this book (aside from the concept, which I think is original and inspired) is how consistent she is with keeping the words in this easy book simple. Yes, there are some somewhat complicated words like “clothing” and “underwear” in there, but for the most part they’re fairly short and they rhyme well! “Four friends, one boat. / Two socks, one coat.” Squid, as the title might suggest, is all about clothing. When a boy changes out of his clothes to go snorkling, that’s when Squid’s moment arrives. He and his friend adapt, cut, color, and generally rework everything from the boy’s pants to shirt. The boy, for the record, returns to take them back so they make a deal to swap the boy’s underwear for the bespoke clothes (which he finds quite fab, eel bows and all). Part of the allure is, of course, the fun concept, but Windness really goes all out on the colors, details, and general underwater feel. Oh, and there are jokes! Can’t go wrong with jokes. Okay, you can go wrong, but she doesn’t.

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Stop That Mop by Jonathan Fenske

Tired of cleaning up slop, a mop runs away, outwitting a bunny that goes hop and a fish that walks with a flop. When will this wild ruckus stop? Surprises that pop! I’ll admit that the idea of a mop running away like The Gingerbread Man (as well as the fact that there’s a fish chasing him on land with a bubble of water around her head and gills) kind of won me over. There’s a madcap, delicious weirdness to this entire endeavor. Aw, what the heck. I’m sold! Fenske’s been doing easy books for quite a while now, so he seems to have this genre pretty well wrapped up, nabbing Geisels like it’s nothing at all. Let’s see how his mobile mop does this time around.

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Tate Tuber: Space Spud by Michael Slack

Definitely on the upper level for new readers, so don’t go handing this to someone who’s just starting out. As a fan of the movie The Martian (and yes, I really do need to read the book) I was already primed to find a story of a potato with ambitions and launched into space up my alley. Based on a true story (backmatter informs us that in 1995 a crew on the space shuttle Columbia grew five small potatoes in the Microgravity Astroculture Laboratory), we follow Tate. When he’s selected to join a crew headed to a space station, he’s under the misapprehension that he’s a part of the team. When it becomes clear that he’s just a seed potato, his little heart is crushed. Fast forward a couple weeks and Tate has successfully grown four more potatoes. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’re exactly like him in terms of personality. But when a potential disaster occurs, it’s these little spuds that step up to save the day. With its panels and speech balloons, you could just as easily put this in your graphic novel section as your easy readers. Even so, those comic book elements definitely add to the book’s appeal. And extra points for including more backmatter than I see in some nonfiction titles! 

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The Tunneler Tunnels in the Tunnel by Michael Rex

Meet the tunneler. He tunnels in the tunnels. Why? Meet the other industrious penguins he finds along the way, and see where all of them end up in the end! I know I’ve said it again and again, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to come up with an original easy book for kids? Some children’s book creators just get it. Michael Rex is one of those folks. In this particular case his text is pretty simple but even coming up with the concept of “the [occupation]-er [occupations]” gives him a fairly wide canvas to play on. It was interesting seeing how he distinguished between the tunneler and the miner too. Amusing and worth a closer look.

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Wally Mammoth: The Sled Race by Corey R. Tabor, ill. Dalton Webb

Wolf, Wally, and Otto the penguin are in a magnificent sled race but who will win? Or is the fun the real point in the end? At this point we’re getting dangerously close to renaming the Geisel Award the Tabor Award (though, bear in mind, I was ready to rename it the Elephant & Piggie Award about 10 years ago). Tabor apparently doesn’t even have to illustrate the books himself to have them work well. Mr. Dalton Webb I am less familiar with, but he brings life, vitality, and action to these pages. Which is a good thing since this is a fun frolic with a nice limited word count. The humor, both visual and in the text, is a key point here as well. Bear it in mind!! 

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That’s it for today! Be sure to stay tuned for more lists on 2025 titles. The full roster is here:

December 1 – Great Board Books

December 2 – Picture Book Readalouds

December 3 – Simple Picture Book Texts

December 4 – Transcendent Holiday Children’s Books

December 5 – Rhyming Picture Books

December 6 – Funny Picture Books

December 7 – Caldenotts

December 8 – Wordless Picture Books

December 9 – Bilingual Books for Kids

December 10 – Math Books for Kids

December 11 – Books with a Message / Social Emotional Learning

December 12 – Easy Books

December 13 – Translated Children’s Books

December 14 – Fairy Tales / Folktales / Religious Tales

December 15 – Gross Books

December 16 – Poetry Books

December 17 – Unconventional Children’s Books

December 18 – 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 – American History

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 2025