The Gift is a heartfelt children’s bedtime story created by the father-and-son team of Paul and Nathaniel Lara. With child-like illustrations and simple text, The Gift tells the warm and inspiring story of how God answered the prayers of a childless couple with the gift of a baby. This gentle tale celebrates family, love and […]

Stuffed toys come to life in this sweet, but problematic picture book. While on a sleepover, cousins Brooke and Lily find a bag labeled, “Magic Dust,” in an empty toy chest and decide to put their toy monkey and bear in the chest, sprinkle them with the dust and close the lid. The next day, […]

In this imaginative but strange picture book, a count invents a flavor of ice cream from a princess’s golden locks and everyone who eats it grows hair all over their bodies.

When Count von Ice de la Cream sees how delicious Princess Clarisse’s hair looks, he asks her father, King Gustav, to waive a law […]

While riding a school bus for the first time, a six-year-old boy runs into bullies and makes a friend in this sweet but slow-paced picture book that, unfortunately, offers nothing new in the heavily visited premise about starting school.

First grader Harry lives at the end of a country road and can’t wait for school […]

In this engaging children’s picture book, Wally is a worm with big plans for his morning: he wants to wiggle all the way across the barnyard to the apple trees, where he aims to munch into “a big juicy apple for breakfast.” That may sound simple enough, but when you’re a worm, the mission presents […]

Young readers (ages 8-11) with a love of action over character development will have fun with this tale of fire-breathing dragons and magic spells. Emil Kackos’s The Golden Heart pits a small gang of multi-specie tweens against an evil wizard determined to take over the world. Good-hearted and fearless, the new friends rise to the […]

If your kids love sitting around a campfire listening to ghost stories — in this case, super-ghastly ghost stories — this one is for them. Gaskin spins a horror story for the pre-teen set that’s not for the faint of heart.

Tricked is actually a long short story, set on Halloween. It’s the first time […]

Pete is a dog who eats all the wrong things. While a monkey munches on a banana, Pete eyes a pizza. While a mountain goat eats grass, Pete samples a cinnamon roll. A wolf, an elephant and a seal all choose healthy eating options; meanwhile, Pete is eating cotton candy and French fries and slurping […]

Hughey takes a clever approach to the premise of the boy who shrinks, then relies on his wits to survive in a big world in this first in a promising middle-grade series.

A grade school boy named Herby accidentally spills a potion he’s developing for the science fair into his bath and shrinks to 6 […]