A couple of nights ago, I read Weezer Changes the World aloud to my four year-old. The ten year-old listened in because it’s one of his favorite books (and mine). Weezer...

The Tree Book for Kids And Their Grown-Ups is everything you have ever wanted to know about the trees you walk by every day, broken down by buds, leaves, bark, flowers,...

As children, when my siblings and I would complain that we were bored, my mom always shooed us back outside with these three words: "Use your imagination." We would...

I love kids' books with photography for the illustrations. A couple of years ago I found Little Erik of Sweden and snatched it up. And then I started to find more...

I recently stumbled upon all of these Munro Leaf books I have never seen before. This Geography Can Be Fun book is great, from the graphics to the information--the...

Zero the Hero is a math-lesson picture book that doesn't feel anything like a lesson, because it actually tells a story. Author Joan Holub and illustrator Tom Lichtenheld...

My son Willem is crazy about this shark book, Sharks and other Creatures of the Deep. The illustrations are really well done and the writing is just clear and comprehensive...

The title sort of says it all, from the author of The Way Things Work, which is also an essential. Any question that you or your child has about the human body is...

My son's 3rd grade teacher gifted him I Survived the Bombing of Pearl Harbor as a holiday gift. I was skeptical since he is a picky reader, and then shocked and...

Graphic novels have gained a great deal of respectability since I was a kid. With the possible exception of Herge's Tintin books—and those had European cred!—back...

Picture books for the youngest readers can be many things—beautiful, moving, offbeat. But sometimes children (and their parents, too) are just looking for something,...

Brian Selznick's debut children's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, followed the path of every new author's fantasy: It got magnificent reviews full of words like...

We're clearly pretty obsessed with vintage kids' books, especially ones that have great photography. This one, Be a Frog, a Bird, or a Tree, is so cool. It shows...

Every now and then, you run into a book that establishes its author—someone whose work you weren't familiar with—as a force to be reckoned with. It happens with...

I completely missed Ted Hughes's 1968 children's fable The Iron Giant in my own childhood; I don't know if it had fallen out of vogue in late-1970s New York, or...

If you don't know the artist Brian Wildsmith, you need to. I bought three of his vintage books at a library sale, and I love them so much, I want to get every single...

I think we have at least three copies of different Pinocchio books—every time I see one for cheap at a garage sale, I have to buy it, as I imagine that it will...

It figures that as soon as I write about how difficult it can be to find standout children's nonfiction, a slew of books come along to prove me wrong. The latest...

I love to collect vintage kids books, but they have to be cheap—I want them, after all, to get read, not just sit on a shelf. Recently I found this book from 1935...

The technology of paper crafting in publishing seems to have undergone a revolution in recent years, with the results perhaps most evident in the realm of pop-up...

It's a wonderful feeling to share a favorite book from your own childhood with your kids, and relive the experience of that discovery. (Reliving anything through...

I like words. A lot. Heck, I have to fight verbosity in my own writing. So why is it that so many of my favorite children's books of the last few years are wordless,...

This is actually the second in a series of posts I began last fall; once again, I'm relying heavily on my blog's only assistant editor, 13-year-old Elizabeth, the...

I'm not much of a reader of modern fiction (and if you're wondering what this has to do with children's books, bear with me—I'll get there). Given the limited...

Spring took a little longer to settle in here in the Northeast this year—at least, the aspect of spring we dreamed about all winter, the part that doesn't involve...

There are only a handful of picture-book authors who are capable of making me laugh out loud as I'm reading their work to my sons. Lane Smith comes to mind, as does...

Sometimes you can tell at first glance that a picture book is going to be special. The art is invariably the driving force—so gorgeous, so unique, that it immediately...

I know reinvention is at the heart of many forms of creativity, but sometimes I can't help being amazed at how often I see something in a children’s book that...

There are tons of tween and YA books out there nowadays that intertwine childhood rebellion and the supernatural. (I was going to suggest this was the legacy of...

The word interactive, at least when applied to children's books, often seems like the sole property of the iPad nowadays. (Of course, it really goes back at least...

I'm obsessed with kids' books that use photography rather than illustration. Someone turned me on to the Lonely Doll series by Dare Wright, which creates poignant...

Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music isn't a new book by any stretch of the imagination—in fact, it wasn't all that new when I read it back in grade school. But it...

When The Invention of Hugo Cabret came out a few years ago, to immediate deserved acclaim (this summer, it becomes a Scorsese-directed feature film), I remember...

Greek myths were my fairy tales when I was young. I remember loving that the stories always seemed to have some kind of twist to them: the hero wasn’t always...

Amos and Boris might be my all time favorite children's book. I still can't get over how beautiful the story and prose are--a reminder that you don't have to dumb...

Now that my older son is reading chapter books, I find myself champing at the bit a lot to introduce him to the classics. No, I’m not bringing Dickens, Tolstoy,...

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to sing the praises of the New York Review Children’s Collection, which continues to find and reissue great but out-of-print...