I have read many books and novels about the Japanese-American Internment program during World War II, but nothing quite as unique as Seen and Unseen by Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki (Chronicle Books, 2022). This nonfiction middle-grade Siebert Award winner is subtitled “What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adam’s Photographs Reveal about the Japanese

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Lost Cat by C. Roger Madder (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) has gorgeous illustrations of a cat and the feet it encounters as it tries to find its owner after it’s lost during a move. I love how the pictures showed things from the cat’s perspective! Each of the different shoes he met gave him a

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What is your favorite fairy tale? Mine has always been Beauty and the Beast; I loved the Disney movie when it first came out. I’ve always wondered, though, how the Beast became so beast-like so fast and that no one remembered him in that castle! The Beast Within by Serena Valentino (Disney Book Group, July

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My Caldecott challenge: Although these Caldecott winner and honor books are not, for the most part, books I’ve read aloud to my son, I still found them interesting. A few I had strong negative opinions of; they show that even books that earned the Caldecott award do become dated! The illustrations in The Hello, Goodbye

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I knew my son (age 3) would love this book as soon as I skimmed through it. Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein (Candlewick, 2010) tells of a father rooster who is trying to tell his daughter chicken some traditional fairy tales, but she keeps interrupting to save the character from the wicked witch, the mean old wolf,

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When I was in third grade, I was very awkward and shy (but who isn’t). Picture a skinny eight-year-old girl with red-haired pigtails and buck teeth. That was me. I sat at my desk and paid attention to my teacher. One particular day, I wasn’t happy. I had talked back to the fifth-grade teacher on

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