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Rough Patch

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Written and illustrated by Brian Lies
Format: Book
Who Its For: Kids

Have you ever had a super-good friend? Have you ever lost a friend?  In The Rough Patch, Evan experiences both.  Evan and his dog are best friends. They go everywhere and do everything together, in all weather, year in and year out. Their very favorite thing is working in Evan’s amazing garden, where they grow beautiful things to see and eat. Then one terrible day, Evan’s doggy friend dies. He is heart-broken, bitter, angry and alone. What will he do without his best friend? No longer able to stand the sight of their beautiful garden, when he feels so dark and sad inside, Evan chops it all down! He then turns his garden into the saddest, loneliest spot he can, a place that grows only terrible plants with thorns and bad smells, until the day a pumpkin vine creeps in under his fence. He begins to care for it and slowly, as it grows, he begins to remember happier times. That vine produces a HUGE pumpkin and Evan decides to enter it at the Fair, where at last he shakes off his darkness and, very unexpectedly, makes a new friend.

Gloriously illustrated by the multiple award winning author of Bats at the Beach, this is an honest and hopeful book about friendship, healing and the ways we deal with loss. A 2019 Caldecott Honor Book and an ALA Notable Book

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Drawn Together

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Drawn Together by Minh Lé
Publication Date: June 5, 2018
Format: Book
Who’s It For: Kids

Who says art is optional?!! This wonderful story grabbed my heart on the first read. Drawn Together is an awesome book about the power of art, and its ability to bring all kinds of people together.

A boy is dropped off, much against his will, to visit with his non-English-speaking grandpa. Without words the distance between them couldn’t be wider! What will they do all day, when neither can understand or communicate with the other? They try television (nope), sharing a lunch (umm, no). Eventually the boy gives up and goes to get his sketchpad and markers to pass the time. Suddenly Grandpa reappears- with HIS sketchpad and brushes! As they begin to draw together, pictures without words let them see each other as they are for the first time, and they create adventures and worlds to express themselves that build a bridge to love and understanding.

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Quiet Please, Owen McPhee!

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Quiet Please, Owen McPhee! by Trudy Ludwig
Format: Book
Who it’s For: Kids

“We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak” Epictetus.
Owen McPhee talks too much. WAY too much, according to his friends, his teachers and his hound dog Hannah! He talks so much that it gets in the way of his listening, with pretty serious consequences for his friends and their science projects… But the next day Owen wakes up with LARYNGITIS! No voice? No TALKING?? What’s a super-chatty kid to do? Read on and see how Owen deals with his laryngitis and learns something about listening and friendship in the process. Make sure to check out Owen’s calendar on the very last page! There are even questions in the back for further discussion with your own chatty ones.

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The Amazing Collection of Joey Cornell

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The Amazing Collection of Joey Cornell by Candace Fleming
Format: Book
Who’s It For: Kids

Is your little a collector of things?  Do you love colors, shapes, textures? Then The Amazing Collection of Joey Cornell is your book, and Joseph Cornell will be your inspiration! Before he was an artist and a filmmaker, Joseph Cornell was first a collector. From a young age he added any object to his collection that intrigued him-and everything intrigued him! His parents brought little bits and trinkets home to him as well, and as his collection grew he would give shows of his “Relic Museum” in the barn to his family. When he grew up, he began using his collection of found objects to make amazing collages and shadowboxes. Joseph never trained as an artist, but his work eventually made its way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York! A fascinating story of an unusual boy and his unusual art, with biographical information and a short bibliography at the very end.

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Millie Fierce

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Millie Fierce by Jane Manning
Format: Book
Who it’s for: Kids

Millie is such a quiet, ordinary girl that no one listens to her or notices her, or gives her more than a tiny piece of cake at parties. She feels almost invisible, like the smudge left by the mean girls who walk through her chalk drawing on the sidewalk. One day Millie has had enough of being invisible. She gets mad- no, she gets Fierce! Now Millie Fierce stomps about and howls, throws food and leaves muddy handprints on the wall. She even pulls the buds off the neighbor’s peony bush! She is noisy and pushy –and now everyone notices her. But not in a good way. When her wild behavior hurts a friend, Millie begins to rethink her particular brand of fierceness, and finds there is room inside her for both Kind and Fierce.

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The Sunhat

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The Sunhat by Jennifer Ward, illustrations by Stephanie Roth Sisson
Format: Book
Who it’s for: Kids

Rosa has a beautiful red sunhat that fits snug upon her head. On her way to school one morning, a hot dry wind whooshes the hat from Rosa’s head and carries it away. The wind drops things where it wishes and on this day sets the sunhat down way out in the desert, where animals come across it one by one. Each seeks shelter underneath it, from sun or from storm, until there is a crowd of desert animals inside, stretching the poor sunhat this way and that! When the storm ends, a wind blows by and whooshes the hat off and away, dropping it into the path of none other than Rosa on her way home from school. The Sunhat is a lovely semi-rhyming story about a beloved hat and its desert adventure.

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