This fun book will get you counting from 0 to 7.5 billion, but also to do so much more. Follow the characters’ stories through the book and see how their lives collide with those of others. There are a lot of secrets to be discovered for the sharp-eyed! You’ll see that everyone is different, everyone has their own life, and that—most importantly—everybody counts. At the end, a spotting section allows you to go back and have even more fun. Everybody Counts is critically acclaimed for its unique approach to visual communication, and has been awarded some of the world’s highest honors for children’s literature.
Awards
The Elevator
A girl and her dog begin their afternoon walk. But before they can get outside to the street, they must take the elevator in their apartment building. She presses the button to go down, but the elevator goes up. Who called it? Is it broken? As the reader turns the page, the girl arrives at different floors, where new friendships are made, old stories are told, and a surprise is revealed. Beautiful human connections filled with kindness and empathy happen in this elevator in what would usually be a routine encounter.
Ode To The Goddess Of The Luo River
The Ode to the Goddess of the Luo River is an ancient Chinese poem created by Cao Zhi, a writer living in the state of Wei during the Three Kingdoms period (c. 220-280 CE). In his tale, Cao Zhi is returning from the capital to his own land when he stops at the Luo River for a rest, where he sees a vision of the goddess so powerful that he instantly falls in love with her. Cao sees a nymph of peerless beauty “as elegant as a startled swan and supple as a swimming dragon”. Though he’s swept away by her ethereal beauty, it’s a love that isn’t meant to be. With its high production values and amazingly-detailed-multi-page foldout spreads, this is a special book that will entice art lovers of all ages.
Small Mercies
Mercy lives in modern-day Pietermaritzburg, South Africa with her eccentric foster aunts―two elderly sisters so poor, they can only afford one lightbulb. A nasty housing developer is eying their house. And that same house suddenly starts falling apart―just as Aunt Flora starts falling apart. She’s forgetting words, names, and even how to behave in public. Mercy tries to keep her head down at school so nobody notices her. But when a classmate frames her for stealing the school’s raffle money, Mercy’s teachers decide to take a closer look at her home life.
Small Mercies has been discussed in My Take/Your Take for December 2020.
All Along The River
Bunny Rabbit has lost her toy duck! So Bunny and her brothers jump in their boat and head down the river in search of Little Duck. Their journey takes them from the mountaintop to the open sea, but there are many other adventures for you to follow along the way. Why are the Speedy Pigs in such a hurry? What will Laura Lamb catch on her fishing line? And what kind of mischief will Sippi Swan get into?
Queen Of Physics; how Wu Chien Shiung helped unlock the secrets of the atom
“When Wu Chien Shiung was born in China 100 years ago, girls did not attend school. But her parents named their daughter “Courageous Hero” and encouraged her love of science. This biography follows Wu as she battles sexism at home and racism in the United States of America to become what Newsweek magazine called the “Queen of Physics” for her work on how atoms split”–
Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story
Told in lively and powerful verse by debut author Kevin Noble Maillard, Fry Bread is an evocative depiction of a modern Native American family, vibrantly illustrated by Pura Belpré Award winner and Caldecott Honoree Juana Martinez-Neal.
Awards:
Winner of the 2020 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal
2020 American Indian Youth Literature Picture Book Honor Winner
National Public Radio (NPR) Best Book of 2019
NCTE Notable Poetry Book
2020 NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People
2020 ALA Notable Children’s Book
2020 ILA Notable Book for a Global Society
A Different Pond
A Different Pond is an unforgettable story about a simple event – a long-ago fishing trip. Graphic novelist Thi Bui and poet Bao Phi deliver a powerful, honest glimpse into a relationship between father and son – and between cultures, old and new. As a young boy, Bao and his father awoke early, hours before his father’s long workday began, to fish on the shores of a small pond in Minneapolis. Unlike many other anglers, Bao and his father fished for food, not recreation. A successful catch meant a fed family. Between hope-filled casts, Bao’s father told him about a different pond in their homeland of Vietnam.
Read two takes on A Different Pond in June 2019’s My Take/Your Take.
They Called Us Enemy
George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s — and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten “relocation centers,” hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
They Called Us Enemy has been discussed in My Take/Your Take for August 2020.
They Called Us Enemy has been featured as a WOW Recommends Book of the Month.
The Return
A young woman gets on the bus and rides out of the big city. She arrives in the countryside, where she is as big as a giant, looming over a tiny house, a garden and her tiny grandmother. The cabbages and the apple trees are far below. Her grandmother smiles up at her in her yellow hat. The young woman bends down to give her little grandmother a big kiss, and then she smells her grandmother’s cooking. She has returned home. When they sit down at the table, the young woman has shrunk to a child-like size, and the two share a meal together in the garden. In this gentle, wordless story Natalia Chernysheva beautifully captures the feelings of coming home to comfort and memories and of returning to our childlike selves.