The internet’s favorite chill chonk stars in this graphically crisp, enthusiasm- powered picture book. “Capy/ Capy/ Capybara/ Little beauty,/ such a cutie!// Yay for Capybara!” extols Harper (I Am a Good Friend), gushing over everything from the large rodent’s “tippy-tappy toes” to its eating habits before setting a tidy plot in motion. When the hot sun sends Capybara splashing into the river, soaking a long-legged, orange-beaked bird, the wet avian extracts a “nose to beak” promise: “No more splashing/ for a week.” But during a bubbly underwater dive, in which the rodent’s potato-like form seems gracefully suspended in aqua space, Capybara spots a gator closing in on Bird. The event necessitates a second giant splash, one that breaks the promise but saves the day, earning Bird’s gratitude and a new vow of “Friends forever.” The artwork’s clean profiles and shifts between landscape spreads and vignettes build momentum and comedy, while cooing narration makes a fluttery counterpoint to the protagonist’s unflappable calm. It’s a cuddle-worthy romp about caring under pressure that should have readers cheering, “Yay for Capybara!” Ages 3–5. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/30/2026 | Details & Permalink

Imagining scenarios in which an adult acknowledges that they can’t do the impossible, Santopolo, making her picture book debut, and Abe (The Pet Potato) spin the admission into a silly-sweet expression of love. Steadily rhythmic lines and digitally finished pencil, pen, and charcoal illustrations follow a caregiver and child, both portrayed with light brown skin, navigating highly specific inadequacies. “I can’t bathe a brontosaurus,” the narrator intones near a dino-filled tub, or “speak in squeak or meow” at a glamorous feline premiere. Nor can they “drink fresh chocolate milk/ from a tiny chocolate cow” at a diner where diminutive bovines carry glasses across the counter. Alongside lilting rhymes, the art’s simple shapes and warm colors play with a child’s dawning awareness that adults aren’t all-powerful. Still, the narrator reveals a significant trick up their sleeve: after dipping into some craft supplies, the adult presents the child with a paint-striped banana, suggesting that where there’s a will—and a bit of imagination—there’s always a way “to show my love to you.” Ages 2–5. Author’s agent: Miriam Altshuler, DeFiore & Co. Illustrator’s agent: Carol Ann Wood, Eunice McMullen. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/30/2026 | Details & Permalink

Via a reverso structure and layered images, Wenjen and Encarnación trace the stories of two children, seemingly generations apart, in a haunting dual narrative of imprisonment and family separation. Spare reportorial lines and visual context clues appear first to describe the experience of a youth of Japanese descent interned during WWII; in a second sequence, the text’s reversal seems to follow a Latinx-cued child seized during a border crossing. Apparently held at the same camp in different eras, each child endures injustice, harsh sunlight and cold nights, and meager food, and both “experienced the kindness of strangers” and “created beauty with what little we had.” The two protagonists remain the most vivid elements amid pages of desaturated color; golds and browns dominate across crisp, high-contrast, shadow-limned illustrations of the earlier events, then shift to teals for the later ones. Hinting at cyclical patterns and repeating history, it’s a timely, personal-feeling picture book about injustice in “this land of promise.” Background characters are portrayed in shadow. More about the book’s background and poetic form, plus an author’s note, conclude. Ages 7–10. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

In a dreamy, metaphor-driven picture book—inspired, per an author’s note, by Alaraj’s husband’s attempts to teach their children Arabic—a caretaker invites a child to learn “my language” by connecting their mother tongue to the larger world of places, objects, and tangible experiences. Rhyming, metaphor-peppered lines offer sensory details around the adult narrator’s perceptions of the vernacular: “My language is a garden,/ a passage by the sea./ It’s a jungle./ It’s a forest, with every kind of tree.” In turn, Wada portrays figures across varied landscapes—from a flower-filled field and a sand-swept desert to snowy mountains and the starry cosmos. In a heartfelt tribute to the roots, rhythms, and reasons behind learning and speaking one’s heritage language, this uplifting text addresses the work of raising a child connected to their family’s culture. Characters are portrayed with various skin tones. An author’s note concludes. Ages 6–8. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

A Hmong family’s “soft and sunny” morning shatters when young Nou opens her front door and finds a hateful message painted on their mailbox in this searching picture book. Though Mom tries to wash it off and Dad covers over it with paint, Nou laments, “It is not the first time a stranger has left us this kind of message.” Nou wants to leave America for “a place where people want us,” Yang writes, but after Dad insists “America is your home,” Nou contemplates the word’s real meaning for “my people,” who “have no country.” And family discussions about places of belonging (Dad’s in his songs, and Mom’s in her garden) leave the child firming up their own definition (“A place where I am accepted”) and creating a kind of home in the notebooks they keep. Visually expressing the story’s emotional shifts in digital, largely shadowless illustrations that mimic graphite, pastels, and watercolor, Kim renders tumult in dense scribbles that morph into sketchbook-like renderings as Nou builds a home, and returns to serenity, by drawing and writing. Author and illustrator notes and a Hmong glossary conclude. Background characters are portrayed with various skin tones. Ages 5–10. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Two long-journeying children, a pink-skinned youth in a red hooded jacket and a pale-skinned child with red-framed glasses, vividly resurrect left-behind places in this yearningly imagined picture book. In a rare moment of play, each describes the homes they miss, first as settings (“It’s a little red house with a garden around it.// My house is big, with many doors and many windows”) and then through the emotions they believe their homes are feeling (“My house must be very scared and lonely right now. It might even be hurt”). One youth wishes for the power to shrink their home enough to carry it; the other wishes their building “could stand up and come with me, on the journey. Blocky collage-style artwork brings a dreamlike feel to the children’s imaginings of caring for the residences and being tended to in return. Envisioning a resting place amid displacement, the conversational narrative gives the children agency in conjuring a respite, and a future, of abundance, safety, and care. Secondary characters are portrayed with various skin tones. Back matter offers context. Ages 5–8. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

A child of Korean descent learns the meaning of a word considered untranslatable in this lovingly intergenerational picture book from Yoon and Lee. As Luna, little brother Joey, and their grandmother, Halmeoni, head to the park, Halmeoni uses a word, jeong, that Luna doesn’t know. The woman suggests that they find examples of its meaning during their outing, but Luna asks, “how can we find it if I don’t know what to look for?” As Luna engages in acts of kindness, though, returning a stranger’s possession and sharing a treat, Halmeoni notes, “This is Jeong.” And back at home, Luna learns that the concept is also present in time together with family and more. The clear affection between characters, drawn using watercolor, colored pencils, and digital media, radiates from the page across scenes depicting family dinners and bedtime snuggles in this tale translating a warm concept beyond borders. Background characters are portrayed with various skin tones. An author’s note concludes. Ages 4–8. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Based, per an author’s note, on the childhood events of Mooradian’s great-grandmother, this first-person story connects arrayed hues to a youth’s flight during the Armenian genocide. The child, Dzovinar, sees pastoral lakeside life upended when a day of gathering herbs ends with a return to the cottage—where the narrator and sister find their parents missing and their home rifled through. Early scenes of contentment (“Rose is the flower by our kitchen door... and the petals of poppies that my mother picks”) give way to portraits of destruction (“Brown is the soldier’s boot print on our front door”) and escape (“Black is the night we cross the desert”). Yim’s simple characterizations of the dot-eyed, pale-skinned protagonists contrast with the child’s deep interiority, hinted at in their rocking “between grief and hope,/ between guilt and joy” and imaginings of the siblings’ parents still at home, “together always.” Establishing a new residence, the sisters paint the walls in colorful hues that remind them of loved ones and home, contributing to a vibrant, layered collage of the duo’s experiences. Characters are portrayed with various skin tones. Ages 4–8. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

A stone serves as metaphor and motif in this piercing story based around a child’s experience at a WWII-era incarceration camp. In 1941 San Pedro, Calif., Minoru and his father, a produce purveyor, share a love of collecting rocks. But when FBI agents accuse Min’s father of being a spy just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Papa is taken away—handing the boy a smooth gray stone “for strength.” Soon, “all persons of Japanese ancestry” are forced out of their homes, and unsparing narration traces Min’s family’s internment from a horse stall at a race track turned detention center to wooden barracks behind barbed wire in Colorado. In desert tones, Sasaki’s boldly graphic, shape-based illustrations emphasize light and shadow across each step of the family’s journey. Based on Tonai’s years at Amache incarceration center and written in collaboration with Gutiérrez, this resonant account underscores young Min’s plaintive words, “We’ve done nothing wrong, and we’re losing everything.” Creator notes, discussion questions, and more conclude. FBI agents are portrayed with pale skin. Ages 4–8. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

In second-person prose and close-hatched, realistic images, Sheth and Carozzi’s deeply felt tale braids together tales of three young refugees. A dark-haired child in a red scarf leaves a Tibet-like “highland home,/ where clouds dance with snowy peaks.” A youth with brown hair and worn boots drifts across the ocean in a boat after leaving a landscape that hints at Syria’s cotton fields. And a blonde child who “left your beloved city/ with sparkling, domed-roof churches” runs wide-eyed while fleeing a place that reads as Ukraine. Each child travels to a refugee camp and an unknown new land, then bears witness to first glimmers of connection and friendship as they meet other children and “all try to belong together.” Digitally enhanced graphite illustrations crisply portray the youths’ homelands and individual experiences in a title that spotlights difficult, necessary journeys and ends with images of hope. Characters are portrayed with various abilities and skin tones. Ages 4–8. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink