MORE 'BEST-BOOKS-OF-2019' POSTS
Newbery / Caldecott 2020: Spring Prediction Edition
Best Books, Best Books of 2019, Newbery / Caldecott Predictions
|This is roundabout the time of year when I start stretching the old award-season muscles. I'm going to pull out the books for you that I think have a darn good chance. At the very least, they're contenders, if not outright winners. Something to guide your reading then.
Tooling about the internet yesterday, I ran across Travis Jonker's recent blog post 10 to Note: Spring Preview 2019. Here then is my own list of upcoming 2019 titles that I simply adore. All of these are Picture Books. Thank you for the idea, Travis!
You have other books about emotions that you love, I have no doubt, but seriously consider supplementing them with Rash’s latest. A loving little book unafraid to be happy, sad, angry, scared, and supremely good.
Simler has previously wowed American audience with such books as Plume and the magnificent The Blue Hour. Now, thanks in part to the elegant translation by Sarah Ardizzone, she has crafted a new kind of bedtime book. One rooted in poetry, dreams, seasons, fuzzy noses, lilting words, and a type of scratch art never before made possible.
Gracefully switching between text and comics, comics and text, author Remy Lai feeds breadcrumbs (or, more accurately, cake crumbs) of humor and sequential art to kids, luring them towards a storyline with a deeper, darker meaning. For the kid that avoids serious stories like the plague, Pie in the Sky is the perfect gateway drug.
Want to look at Cinderella through the mores of the 21st century? I suggest pairing yourself up with an artist that’s been dead for 80 years. Why it’s so crazy, it just might work.
Kwame Alexander’s words are grand. Kadir Nelson’s art soars. But when you put those two things together, and they work in tandem, they bring out the best in one another. Unrelenting, undeniable, unavoidable. Fail to read this book at your peril. I hope it is only the beginning.
If you know Aaron Becker's name it's probably from that magnificent quest trio of picture books, Journey, Quest, and Return. Becker took a seemingly simple form, the picture book, and gave it breadth and depth without sacrificing child-interest and focus. But apparently that wasn't enough of a challenge because now he's created a board book and it's a doozy of a marvel.
There’s the usual historical, factual stuff . . . and then there’s the pure science fiction. Books like We’re Not From Here by Geoff Rodkey. Unapologetically bold, it wears its little science fiction loving heart on its sleeve. Managing to also be funny and strangely poignant, this isn’t a book about “Why can’t we all just get along?” It’s about what happens when our differences are so glaring we have no choice but to acknowledge that they’re there at all.
A bit of art, a bit of text, this title typifies picture books at their best. Bold and small and gutsy and quiet. A title you could easily miss, but why would you want to?