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Portrait of Annette Bay PimentelI love to read nonfiction picture books by other people. Unless otherwise stated in a post, I do not accept any books for the purpose of review. I check books out of the library or buy them before I review them.

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11Sep

Cover Reveal of All the Way to the Top

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The cover is in for my new book, All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight for Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything, has arrived! It tells the true story of how an eight-year-old girl lobbied for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 when it was stalled in Congress. What did Jennifer do? […]

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4Sep

Just Like Rube Goldberg

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review Uncategorized
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Sarah Aronson’s wonderful biography Just Like Rube Goldberg opens by engaging the reader with an intriguing question. “Question: How do you become a successful, award-winning artist and famous inventor without ever inventing anything at all? (This is not a trick question.” Often in picture book biographies, the narrative voice intentionally recedes behind the story. But […]

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24Jul

A Story about Bicycle Face

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Born to Ride: A Story about Bicycle Face is a fictionalized story. It tells how a turn-of-the-century girl shakes off expectations and takes off on a bicycle. The story is charming. I loved all the references to women’s suffrage in the illustrations. But my very favorite part of the book is the back matter. The back matter explains how the term […]

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10Jul

Gloria Takes a Stand

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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In Gloria Takes a Stand, Jessica M. Rinker brings us an engaging picture book biography of Gloria Steinem. She ties together disparate parts of the activist’s life with a shifting refrain: “Gloria watched. She learned. And helped…. “Gloria wished. She read. And imagined…” and so on, all the way to “Gloria still writes. She still speaks. And still listens.” […]

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26Jun

Stars

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Stars come in all varieties. Elvis is King tells the childhood and youth of Elvis Presley via short poems. The focus on the artistic roots of Elvis’ music was effective–and at times heart-wrenching. But the most wonderful part of the book, in my opinion, is the quirky art. I loved Red Nose Studio’s art in The Secret Subway and […]

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12Jun

How-To Nonfiction

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How-to nonfiction is a special category. I don’t think about it a lot, but when I go to the library, I often see kids trolling the shelves for books that will let them make or do something. So I was interested when an agency-mate asked if I wanted to profile her how-to book, Forest Fairy Crafts Through the Seasons. Since […]

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29May

Family Members and Successes

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Women in the past were understood primarily in terms of the roles they played in families. Two new nonfiction picture books embrace the importance of family relationships but show women as both family members and successes. Secret Engineer tells the story of how, in the nineteenth century, Emily Roebling kept her husband’s severe disabilities secret so […]

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22May

Women Making Art

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Several new nonfiction picture books tell the stories of women making art. Brave Ballerina is a biography of African American ballerina Janet Collins. It uses a predictive rhyming form: This is the girl who danced in the breeze to the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of towering trees. The language was playful and inventive, and the rhythm fun to read […]

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1May

Rich Back Matter

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In today’s nonfiction picture books, rich back matter abounds! I love the way back matter extends the experience of reading a book. Often author essays explore issues of research as well as showing their personal connection to subject matter. Rich back matter also opens up books to different kinds of audiences–kids who are passionate about […]

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3Apr

Science Concepts

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It’s easy to find nonfiction picture books about animals. It’s trickier to find ones that tackle a broader range of science concepts. I loved the way both Just Right and Snowman-Cold=Puddle examined more abstract concepts.\ Just Right is an exploration of what we know about planets around other stars and how astronomers search for them. It’s loaded […]

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27Mar

The Boy Who Grew A Forest

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The Boy Who Grew a Forest is a lyrical picture book biography of Jadav Payeng. As a boy, Payeng witnessed erosion and forest loss. His response was to quietly begin planting trees in a sandbar in a river. As the back matter explains, “In 2008, almost thirty years after he planted his first seedlings, Jadav’s forest was discovered by local […]

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13Mar

Let ‘Er Buck!

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I loved Let ‘Er Buck by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson. This picture book biography tells the story of George Fletcher, and African American cowboy who, in 1911 entered the Pendleton Round-up rodeo and arguably won but was not awarded the top prize by the judges. The book describes how the audience took matters into their own hands to make […]

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27Feb

Juxtapositions and Arguments

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Recently I was trying to come up with a list of mentor texts for a writer who is working on a middle grade biography project. While these days publishers occasionally bring out traditional birth-to-death biographies for middle schoolers (this year’s Sibert medalist, The Girl Who Drew Butterflies, or last year’s beautiful Rosa’s Animals, or the astonishing Some Writer, for example), much […]

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30Jan

Animal Books

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I’ve been working through my stash of 2018 nonfiction books and discovered I had a set of animal books. So many great titles! Bugs Don’t Hug: Six-Legged Parents and Their Kids by Heather Montgomery, illustrated by Stephen Stone (Charlesbridge: 2018). This book about parenting practices of insects has fantastic page turns! On one page we see what human parents do, and on […]

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7Nov

Counting on Katherine

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Counting on Katherine tells the story of Katherine Johnson, the African American woman who calculated Apollo 13’s trajectory. The book plays with the word “count.” It starts, “Katherine loved to count.” We see tiny Katherine Johnson playing with, and fascinated by, numbers. But “count” quickly assumes another meaning as Katherine counts on her father and […]

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24Oct

Run to Read!

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Every year Washington, Missouri holds a 5K race called “Run to Read!” The newspaper, the Y, the library, and the local independent bookstore combine forces to gather community around the wonder of books. This year they decided to donate a portion of every entry to the Bobbi Gibb Marathon Sculpture Project, and they invited me […]

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10Oct

Silent Star

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Silent Star is a picture book biography of William Hoy, a professional baseball player in the late nineteenth century who flourished in his career despite his inability to hear. The book starts with a lively description of one of Hoy’s record-breaking games and then goes back to the scene, when Hoy was three years old, […]

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3Oct

Water Land

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I first saw Water Land, pre-publication, at a conference where both Christy Hale and I were presenting. I was completely dazzled. The published version is just as wonderful as I had remembered. Hale starts with a simple insight–that both water and land can form analogous shapes. She then uses brilliant book design to connect each land […]

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26Sep

The Truth About Dolphins

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This year, Maxwell Eaton III has published three books in his new The Truth About… series. A busy year for him! I looked at The Truth About Dolphins. The book has three different levels of narration. The main text is a simple, straightforward nonfiction text: “This is a dolphin. Dolphins look like fish. But they aren’t” You […]

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19Sep

On Our Street

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On Our Street: Our First Talk about Poverty opens by acknowledging that different people live in different ways. Then it invites children to inquire about those differences: “It’s okay to ask questions when you do not understand the way another person is living.” Each of the following spreads has a question a child might ask about […]

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5Sep

Fallingwater

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I loved Fallingwater, Marc Harshman and Anna Egan Smucker’s picture book account of Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the iconic house. One of the astonishing things about the book is that it doesn’t even pretend to start with the sources of inspiration in Wright’s childhood. Instead, the first spread shows an old, discouraged, gray-haired man. “Once […]

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29Aug

Fairies

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In 2012 I read a middle grade nonfiction book that bowled me over: The Fairy Ring: Or Elsie and Frances Fool the World  by Mary Losure (Candlewick: 2012). It was the true story of how two girls faked photos that tricked many adults, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, into believing that fairies are real. I had never […]

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22Aug

Pass Go

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review Uncategorized
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The story of an invention can be surprisingly convoluted. Pass Go and Collect $200 does a great job of tracing the complicated story of the boardgame Monopoly. Monopoly arguably started as Landlord’s Game, a game created by Elizabeth Magie to critique capitalism. Tanya Lee Stone deftly describes the social conditions that led Magie to patent the idea in […]

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