Susan Hood, illus. by Janice Nadeau. Kids Can, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-55453-565-1
Like Katharine Holabird’s Angelina Ballerina, this effervescent story from Hood (the Pup and Hound series) stars a dainty, ballet-loving mouse, but Sophie’s life is a little edgier than Angelina’s. She has no parents, makes her home “atop an ancient
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Susan Hood, illus. by Mary Lundquist. Random, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-385-37672-3
How do you defuse the emotional upheaval of a new baby’s arrival? Reframe it as a special ops assignment worthy of a Tom Cruise or Matt Damon vehicle. “Headquarters is about to get a brand-new recruit,” writes Hood (Rooting for You), and it’s up to...
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Susan Hood, illus. by Mary Lundquist. Random House, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-385-38471-1
Hood and Lundquist reprise the conceit behind Mission: New Baby (2015) as they bring a secret agent sensibility to the “hunt for intelligence” (aka going to school). In numbered steps, Hood walks readers through the mission, which includes “#3. Meet
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Susan Hood, illus. by Melissa Sweet. S&S/Wiseman, $16.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-4424-0601-8
Odd-looking little Spike, who lives in a pond in Mexico, is a fierce monster in his own mind. But to everyone else in his ecosystem, Spike is a harmless cutie-pie (he’s actually an axolotl, an endangered Mexican salamander). El pato (a duck) calls...
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Susan Hood, illus. by Matthew Cordell. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4231-5230-9
“I am NOT coming out!” says a tiny lime-green seed nestled deep within the warm brown earth. Because, really, who knows what awaits in the world above? But with the encouragement of an astute, bespectacled worm (“There are friends to feed you,/...
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Susan Hood, illus. by Matthew Cordell. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4231-5234-7
The team behind 2013's Rooting for You returns with another motivation-minded, pun-titled story for those in the midst of growing up. Instead of an underground seed blossoming into a flower, this book opens underwater, where clusters of eye-shaped...
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Susan Hood, illus. by Sally Wern Comport. Simon & Schuster, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-4814-3095-1
Hood’s (Rooting for You) beautifully narrated true tale begins in Cateura, a “noisy, stinking, sweltering slum” of Paraguay. That’s where Ada Ríos lives with her family, recyclers (gancheros) who collect and sell trash from the nearby landfill. When
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Susan Hood, illus. by Jed Henry. Harper, $12.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-06-201029-2
As three children dressed as a witch, shark, and bat go trick-or-treating, they
defuse potentially scary situations with one word: “If a yip and a yowl/ make you shiver and scowl,/ what do you say?/ Boo!” Thus armed, the kids face “wind [that]...
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Susan Hood, illus. by various artists. Harper, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-06-269945-9
Selina Alko, Sophie Blackall, and LeUyen Pham are among 13 woman illustrators whose artwork accompanies Hood’s biographical tributes to trailblazing women, several of whom are far from household names. Multistanza poems do a fine job of...
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Susan Hood. HarperCollins, $19.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-06321-448-4
Focusing on Henny Sinding (b. 1921), daughter of a respected Royal Danish Navy commander, Hood’s expansive verse recounting of the WWII Danish resistance movement builds a strong sense of shared Danish values while encompassing Nazi Germany’s 1940...
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Susan Hood. Simon & Schuster, $17.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-6659-4324-6
When Nazis begin bombing 15-year-old Bess’s East London neighborhood,
she persuades her parents to apply for the opportunity for Bess and her younger brother Louis to escape on one of the children’s evacuations to Canada. Bess, Louis, and 88 other...
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Susan Hood, illus. by Christiane Engel. HarperCollins, $18.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-06-298139-4
In this factually augmented poetry collection, Hood illuminates the reasons, repercussions, and remedies for humans’ considerable use of plastic. She begins with “Fantastic Plastic,” which presents a rhetorical question: “Where would the world be...
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Susan Hood, illus. by Linda Yan. Candlewick, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-5362-0114-7
Combining rhyming lines with context beneath, this counting picture book offers a summation of things that exist in the world. “One can be one thing/ all on its own—one star,/ one stream,/ one stick,/ one stone,” Hood begins. Text along the bottom...
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Susan Hood with Greg Dawson. HarperCollins, $16.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-06-308389-9
This hard-hitting nonfiction biography told in verse documents the escape of two Jewish teen piano prodigies who assumed aliases to avoid Nazi persecution during WWII. Ukrainian Zhanna Arshanskaya and her sister Frina enjoyed a childhood filled with
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