Betsy Bird's Blog, page 189

The Top 100 Board Books Poll Countdown: #15 – 11

I always like to include the publication dates of each of these board books when I present them on my lists. I do this partly because I’m interested in watching what constitutes a “classic” board book. If a book was originally a picture book and then was converted to a board book later, is it more likely to end up on this Top 20 list? Can we pinpoint a “boom time” in board books where the quality went through the roof? Some of these questions will have to wait to be answered until we have mor...

Review of the Day – Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness by Anastasia Higginbotham

Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness
By Anastasia Higginbotham
Dottir Press
$18.95
ISBN: 9781948340007
Ages 6 and up
On shelves September 4th

The other day I was at the table with my 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son and the subject of police shootings came up. I think there was a time when I would have been surprised by that statement. I think that time was long ago. In any case, as with many things my husband and I found that to explain anything about the shootings we had to go in...

The Top 100 Board Books Poll Countdown: #20-16

This is the first of the last four posts of our poll! How time does fly. Initially I was going to release each of the Top 20 books in its own separate post, but life is short and I’m looking forward to posting something else for the remainder of the month of August. Not that going through these books hasn’t been a blast. And don’t worry. When the list is officially done I’ll make a post of all of them together for easy reference. Which brings us to . . .

 

 #20 – Where Is Baby’s Belly Button...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish

How do you follow up The Giving Tree? Well, that’s a tricky one. I wasn’t entirely certain where to go from the top of the pops (as it were). I wanted to do something recognizable but not necessarily a slam dunk. And I don’t know why Amelia Bedelia occurred to me. She’s so ubiquitous that no one ever really questions her presence on classic book lists. Still, the more I thought about her, the more I wondered if she really warrants inclusion in the “canon” of children’s literature (howsoever y...

Review of the Day: Small Spaces by Katherine Arden

Small Spaces
By Katherine Arden
G.P. Putnam & Sons (an imprint of Penguin Young Reader’s Group)
$16.99
ISBN: 9780525515029
Ages 10-14
On shelves September 25th

In fourth grade I sold my soul to the Scholastic Book Club’s Apple paperbacks. There was only one thing in the entire world I ever wanted to read, at that point. Only one thing that could make my little heart go pitter-pat, and that was the comforting presence of ghost stories. This was long before Bob Stine decided to slap an “R...

The Top 100 Board Books Poll Countdown: #25-21

Today I’ll be including my very first board book from 2019 in the mix. How is it possible that it got so many votes already? Read on and I’ll divulge all.

 

 #25 – The Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle (2015)

My first introduction to this book came by way of, of all things, Publishers Weekly. Though I never saw it on the New York Times bestseller list of picture books, consistently this book would crop up on PW’s top picture book list week after week, month after month. It was fascinatin...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

It’s very special episode day today! Kate and I are celebrating our 50th episode (where does the time go?). It seemed fitting that we mark the occasion with an important book. There are so many titles that we still haven’t done that could yield wonderful conversations. As such, it seems fitting that we finally do the most requested book of our podcast. In the course of things I manage to come up with a connection between this and Harold and the Purple Crayon (that I think stands up in court),...

The Top 100 Board Books Poll Countdown: #30-26

Two surprises on today’s list. First, there is the fact that Llama Llama makes two appearances on a single list. The second is that all but one of these books originally appeared as picture books and were since adapted. Is this a sign of things to come? As we near the Top 10, will everything there just be picture books shrunken down? Only time will tell. In the meantime, enjoy the bounty:

 #30 – Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney (2018)

Of course I’m having a hard time looking at good o...

Review of the Day: We Don’t Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins

We Don’t Eat Our Classmates
By Ryan T. Higgins
Hyperion (an imprint of Disney Book Group)
$17.99
ISBN: 978-136800355-1
Ages 4-7
On shelves now

Each year, as the new school year draws ever closer, a bounty of first day of school books are published. The bulk of them are overly familiar. A couple of them are a bit witty. But one of them, only one of them, will ascend to the level of “classic”. This year, I am very pleased to announce that the honor simply must go to We Don’t Eat Our Class...

The Top 100 Board Books Poll Countdown: #35-31

Before we go too much further into the poll list, I want you to look at this little graph I pulled today from my most recent copy of Publishers Weekly. Tell me what you see here:

Did you notice the board book numbers? How they are conspicuously higher than all other types of books? This isn’t a fluke. With every PW I read I see over and over again that board book sales are going up and up and up with no indication that they’re going to fall. To what do we ascribe this? Is it the fact that bo...