Winners of the American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards!

I talk about Jason Chin A LOT in this newsletter – I just love his illustrations – and this picture book is one that I’ve recommended dozens of times this year. Watercress was awarded the Newbery Honor as well as the Caldecott Medal. This book is set in Ohio, and in the start of the book we see a family driving along a road. The car stops and the family gets out to gather watercress at the side of the road, and the young girl is embarrassed that her family is foraging. But the experience leads to her parents sharing their own stories of gathering watercress in their home country, which helps create new family memories of watercress and feeling grateful for what they have.

This intricately woven book follows a girl named Petra Peña, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita. But when a comet destroys earth, only a few hundred scientists and their children – among them Petra and her family – have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race. Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet – and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth. This book will make you think and wonder and rediscover what it means to be human.

This beautifully illustrated and informative book provides a powerful look at the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation’s history. The book traces the history of African Americans in Tulsa’s Greenwood district and chronicles the devastation that occurred in 1921 when a white mob attacked the Black community.

This vividly illustrated picture book joins the ¡Vamos! world with familiar characters like Little Lobo, his dog Bernabé, and their pals El Toro and La Oink Oink. Little Lobo just got a new truck, and they are using it to carry party supplies over the bridge. But the line is long and there is a lot of traffic. They set up a party to pass the time where people from two countries meet each other and celebrate new friendships.