If there’s a common theme to the half-dozen hottest releases for the children’s market this fall from indie presses, it’s this: no matter how small and insignificant one considers oneself in this big, beautiful universe, every creature matters.
Star treks
Angela Engel, the publisher of Collective Book Studio, calls The Fly Who Flew to Space (Sept., ages 4–8) by Lauren Sánchez, illustrated by Raleigh Stewart, “a magical book.” When flipped over and unfolded, the cover jacket becomes a glow-in-the-dark poster featuring the rocket ship blasting off, taking the insect protagonist on a celestial adventure. And there’s a “secret page,” Engel says, that also glows in the dark. “Have you ever ridden the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland? It reminds me of that. It’s going to be so nostalgic for parents, who are totally going to geek out.”
The Fly, which is Sánchez’s debut as a children’s book author and Stewart’s as an illustrator, was a labor of love. Sánchez, a licensed pilot, is passionate about teaching children to be curious, to be explorers—especially girls; that’s why the fly’s gender is indeterminate, Engel says. “In STEM, there’s still such a gender disparity. How many female pilots are there? Part of Lauren’s mission is to let girls know that you can fly a plane; you can fly into space. It’s not something girls are trained to believe.”
Norton Young Readers publishing director Simon Boughton describes In Praise of Mystery (Oct., ages 4–8) by U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón, illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Peter Sís, as “transcendent,” and indeed, it literally is. The text, a poem, will be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft when it leaves Earth this fall, traveling 1.8 billion miles to reach Jupiter’s second moon in 2030.
Limón’s debut as a children’s author “came together very quickly,” Boughton recalls. Last fall, after Limón wrote the poem for NASA, “there was this feeling that it would make a wonderful children’s book, and it came to us on submission.” Boughton thought immediately of pulling in Sís to illustrate it. “They both have stature in different worlds, and I was eager to bring these two great artists together. Fortunately, this wasn’t just wishful thinking: I knew Peter had some time. He finished the book in January. It was a gift that he was able to do it so quickly and so beautifully.”
In Praise of Mystery will pub 10 days before the Europa Clipper liftoff. “It’s a dramatic book launch, being associated with a rocket going off,” Boughton says. “Let’s hope everything goes according to plan.”
Roger Mello’s new picture book, Griso, the One and Only (Oct., ages 4–8), translated from Portuguese by Roger Hahn, is the fifth picture book by the Brazilian artist to be published by Elsewhere Editions, an Archipelago Books imprint specializing in picture books in translation. As the last unicorn on Earth searches all over the world for a companion, he is depicted in a different artistic style on each spread, based on illustrations of unicorns from prehistoric cave paintings to 20th-century surrealism.
Praising Mello’s bold use of color, especially his “penchant for neon orange and cherry red,” Elsewhere Editions director Emma Raddatz also marvels at Mello’s “exhilarating” capacity for switching up his style, not only between projects, but even within a single book. “Griso encourages you to take inspiration from the world’s art, and to feel freedom in exploring alternative styles,” she says. “It also speaks to the feeling of yearning, and of close, watchful study of a color, artwork, or line. Griso makes you want to prop up a museum stool, gaze at a medieval tapestry for hours, and set to work on observing all that you can.”
Finding freedom
What I Must Tell the World: How Lorraine Hansberry Found Her Voice (Oct., ages 4–8) by Jay Leslie, illustrated by Loveis Wise, is only the second release from Hillman Grad, a Zando Projects imprint with a mission of publishing books that spotlight “the beauty and complexities of underrepresented communities” with stories that “can change the world.” It seems appropriate that Hillman’s first picture book would be about the Chicago-born playwright who wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play written by a Black woman: publisher Lena Waithe is herself a screenwriter, actor, and producer from Chicago.
Zando editor T.J. Ohler notes that much of this book’s power comes from its addressing potentially uncomfortable topics in an honest but age-appropriate way. What I Must Tell the World begins with Hansberry’s parents’ response to racist attacks on the family: they filed a lawsuit to desegregate their Chicago neighborhood that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940. Years later, after marrying a man in 1953, Hansberry acted on her realization that she was attracted to other women.
Praising What I Must Tell the World for being “a great book for talking about queerness, about the creative process, about finding your voice,” Ohler admits that he cried the first time he read it. “This was why I became an editor: books like this.”
Levine Querido publisher Arthur A. Levine maintains that The Forbidden Book (Oct., ages 12 and up), 2023 Printz Award finalist Sacha Lamb’s sophomore effort, explores themes far beyond its succinct first three sentences: “Dybbuks. Illegal printing. A genderqueer lesbian with a knife.”
Levine acknowledges that all of those things are present in this tale of a teenager who takes on the identity of a male to run away from her life in a Jewish settlement in an alternate universe 19th-century Russia, where demons interact with human beings. It’s a fairy tale woven by “a master storyteller,” he says. It’s also the kind of book that “invokes discussion of how gender impacts power.” At its essence, though, Levine says, this is a story “about friendship and it’s about freedom. It’s also a mystery; there’s danger.”
Contending that there’s “a lot of sameness in the contemporary teenage voice,” Levine describes Lamb’s voice as “refreshing. The prose is very accessible, but it’s also written in the voice of an oral storyteller.” In addition, he says, as a physical object, The Forbidden Book is “gorgeous.”
It took Soho Teen longer than it should have to acquire When Mimi Went Missing (Nov., ages 14 and up), Suja Sukumar’s debut YA novel, says editor Alexa Wejko. “Two years ago, it came into my box during that weird post-Covid time. We weren’t sure of the state of the world and had slowed down on submissions. I had to put it on the back burner, but it just stuck with me. I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
This psychological thriller about the splintering of the relationship between two once-close cousins is also, Wejko says, “a very powerful coming-of-age story,” featuring main characters who are of Indian descent. “I think there’s less representation of BIPOC characters in genre [fiction],” she says. “This isn’t the only thriller with Southeast Asian American characters in it, but there still aren’t enough. I was happy to have representation overlap with a coming-of-age story within a classic genre thriller.”
