Nothing beats curling up with a kid and a book that screams "don't quit." I've done it a ton with my own little ones back in the day, watching their…
Bedtime often turns into a nightly tug-of-war with toddlers bouncing off walls. I've been there, chasing a 2-year-old around the living room while the clock ticks past 8 PM. That's…
Books aimed at STEM learning for 7-year-olds catch kids right as they're wired to dig into the world around them. Think of a child staring at falling leaves, blurting out,…
James Bird’s THE BRAVE (Feiwel and Friends, 320 pp., $16.99; ages 9 to 12) is a bighearted book about Collin. Collin has a few problems. The most pressing is his…
I remember 12 as a particularly stressful age. My family had recently moved to England, and for a time I was the center of attention, asked to repeat things in…
In the tradition of Ransom Riggs’s “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” and Katherine Dunn’s “Geek Love,” Lisa Brown’s THE PHANTOM TWIN (First Second, 208 pp., $17.99; ages 12 to…
For every generation categorized as “lazy” or “uninformed,” along comes a group of young people to Shut. That. Down. In 1960, it was four college students in Greensboro, N.C., who began…
All hail the best friend! That person we confide in and listen to without fear or judgment. The one with whom we share in-jokes. The one who holds our hand,…
Fairly often one of my students raises a hand in class just as I’m saying something that feels important. When the palm hangs there, imploring but impertinent, I turn and…
In 1955 Beverly Cleary published “Beezus and Ramona,” and the world fell in love with Ramona Quimby, a spark plug of a kid sister who made being bad look like…
On the surface, Rebecca Stead’s THE LIST OF THINGS THAT WILL NOT CHANGE (Wendy Lamb Books, 224 pp., $16.99; ages 8 to 12) is a book about complicated circumstances. Bea’s parents…
There are scores of novels about World War II, but far fewer about what happened next. When we meet Zofia Lederman in August 1945 in Monica Hesse’s THEY WENT LEFT…
