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With oceans covering 70% of the globe, kids may want to consider what careers could place them in this wet and rich environment. DIARY OF A MARINE BIOLOGIST by Anita Thomas, illustrated by Sarah Wilkins and Anita Thomas, coming from Walker Books Australia, would make a good resource to provide them. You can preview an e-galley this week through your NetGalley account. There’s so much to explore here: Whale monitoring, clown fish, chameleon-like cuttlefish, sea snakes, human built reefs, and even how surfing teaches us to ride the waves and understand the ocean!
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Our Latest Article
- Many Doors, One Home: Apartment Living in Kids’ Books
For many decades, children’s picture books we see in North America that include realistic descriptions and/or illustrations of dwellings have largely featured homes that appear to be single family, often suburban with lawns. Like others around the world, however, many kids here live in homes that are apartments—whether middle class, well-to-do, or economically struggling. What a relief, then, it is to see picture books featuring life in multi-dwelling buildings! Sometimes the building’s arrangement goes uncommented in the story itself, while in other books the building’s multiple units play a role in the tale.
Artist Marta Kulesza’s 630 MAPLE STREET: Explore Our Building Through the Year, published by Floris Books, offers views into the several flats inside the building, the occupants’ ranges of activities as the seasons change, and lots of tiny details to engage readers. Wordless yet filled with stories, here’s a great starting point for discovering apartment living or finding new ways to imagine how to tell stories about the activities in your own building.
A SLEEPLESS NIGHT by Micaela Chirif, illustrated by Joaquin Camp, translated from Spanish by Jordan Landsman, published by Transit Children’s Editions tells—and shows—the tale of how a baby’s crying affects the family and the neighbors. Everyone has a suggestion and wants to help, but it’s grandma who does the trick.
SECRET GARDENERS by Lina Laurent, illustrated by Maija Hurme, published by Pajama Press, stands out for its combination of fiction and solid information about urban gardening. Illustrations clearly show details about making use of a vacant lot and also the location of that lot among a neighborhood of large apartment buildings. We visit a rooftop as well as the ground, see houses in the distance and neighbors on apartment balconies. Both setting and story remind readers that apartment life doesn’t necessarily mean living in a concrete jungle. And, of course, the young gardeners create a green space where once the lot seemed empty.
Elena Arevalo Melville’s ELKI IS NOT MY DOG illustrated by Tonka Uzu, published by Scallywag Press, takes apartment architecture for granted while telling a story about apartment-dwelling kids who can’t take the dog who’s found them inside their building. No pets allowed there. However, when Elki goes missing, the apartment dwellers turn out first to help find her and then to care for her communally.
There are chapter books and middle grade stories, too, in which characters reside in multiple dwelling buildings.
The MYSTERY AT THE BILTMORE series by Colleen Nelson, illustrated by Peggy Collins, published by Pajama Press, has already grown to four adventures, featuring a very young “house detective” in the grand Biltmore apartment edifice. Elodie is quite well-off, as are her neighbors who have jewels stolen, another missing his famous recipe, and a secretive neighbor whose cat is missing. The cast reaches beyond Elodie and the various victims to include Biltmore staff and her friend Oscar, who entered Elodie’s life as a new neighbor.
Ellen Weinstein’s middle grade novel FIVE STORIES reveals a different New York apartment building in a different way. Listen to Live Oak Media’s full-cast production performed by Eva Kaminsky, Carlotta Brentan, Robert Jimenez, Desiree Rodriguez, Albert M. Chan, and the author, to hear from five child residents across as many generations, each of whom made their home in the same building. The production values and professionalism of the diverse narrators reflect the changes of class and ethnicity spanning the building’s inhabitants, giving listeners a fine opportunity to discover how one building can have many stories within it.
Where do you live? What kinds of stories could your dwelling have contained in the past? What stories can you tell from it today?