Annette Bay Pimentel

I 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.

Recent Posts

6Dec

Things that Go

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Uncategorized

My three year old grandson loves “things that go.” Here are three books perfect for him and other fans of cars, trucks, trains, and buses. All the Way to Havana by Margarita Engle (Henry Holt: 2017) is set in Cuba and narrated by a boy who is going with his family to a party for […]

Tags: biography Henry Holt Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Latin America Millbrook transportation writer

29Nov

Trail-blazing Female Artists

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Today I’m reading picture book biographies of two trail-blazing female artists: Zaha Hadid, an architect; and Amalia Hernandez, a dancer The World Is Not a Rectangle introduced me to Zaha Hadid. I loved learning about this architect I’d never heard of, and found myself falling down an Internet rabbit hole of looking at her designs! The […]

Tags: Abrams architect Beach Lane dancer women

22Nov

Immigrants, Refugees, and Kids’ Books

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

My all-time favorite Thanksgiving book is How Many Days to America? by Eve Bunting. It tells the story of refugees who come ashore in the US on Thanksgiving day. It’s a book about all the things I’m most proud of about my country–the way we have in the past welcomed refugees; the way our culture makes […]

Tags: Annick Press Chronicle immigration Kids Can Press refugees

15Nov

Strong Women and Men

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I’ve been having fun gearing up for the release in February of my book about a remarkable female athlete, so it was fun this week to find other books about strong women and men. Long-Armed Ludy is about the 1922 women’s shot-put world record holder, Lucile (Ludy) Godbold. I loved the folksy, fun-to-read-aloud voice in […]

Tags: athletes Charlesbridge women athletes

8Nov

Frida Kahlo and her Animalitos

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Frida Kahlo and her Animalitos gives young readers an introduction to the artist’s life and work through the lens of her pets. This is an especially great choice since Kahlo’s animals so often appear in her art. The book opens in a way that will sway any animal lover: “This is the story of a little […]

Tags: animals artist North South Books

1Nov

Grand Canyon

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

(I’m jumping with joy that my Feb 2018 book, Girl Running, got a Kirkus star! Details here.) One of our great American resources is our national parks: Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon…Of course those national parks have ended up in books for kids. Grand Canyon is an information-packed, elegantly structured picture book that uses text features to […]

Tags: national parks neal porte

25Oct

The Quest for Z

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

When I’m on the hunt for a nonfiction picture book topic, I’m drawn to the transcendent, to the tranformative…to the hero. I think most picture book writers are! But Greg Pizzoli seems to be making his mark in the nonfiction picture book world by writing about anti-heroes. In Tricky Vic, he profiled a con-man. In The Quest […]

Tags: explorer Viking

18Oct

Martí’s Song for Freedom

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

José Martí was an activist for Cuban independence in the late nineteenth century, but because of his political activities in Cuba, he was exiled. He ended up spending many years in the United States. Martí’s Song for Freedom tells the story of his life but also captures that duality of his movement between Cuba and the United […]

Tags: Central America Lee & Low poetry

11Oct

Margaret and the Moon

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Lot of recent books about female scientists! An eighteenth century astronomer. a marine biologist, a computer programmer. And today, a female member of the moon launch team is profiled in Margaret and the Moon. I loved the voice of the book, and its quick pace. The book starts, “Margaret Hamilton loved to solve problems. She came […]

Tags: Alfred A. Knopf scientists women

4Oct

Grace Hopper Queen of Computer Code

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Grace Hopper Queen of Computer Code celebrates the life of one of the pioneers of computer programming. The book is structured like a pearl necklace–it’s made up of a series of discrete anecdotes, strung together in roughly chronological order. Each anecdote tells us a bit about Grace Hopper’s character, but each basically also stands on […]

Tags: computers science Sterling women

27Sep

Shark Lady

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

It’s sometimes tough for kids–and adults!–to look at successful adults and figure out what their success has to do with the day-to-day life they had as children. In Shark Lady Jess Keating does a wonderful job of showing how childhood interests and passions led to Eugenie Clark’s important discoveries as a marine biologist. Clark is […]

Tags: scientists Sourcebooks women

20Sep

The Skydiving Beavers

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

The Skydiving Beavers is a great title–especially when you know it’s also a nonfiction story. (The only thing that I, as an Idahoan, think might have made it better would have been to keep it in its original form–The Skydiving Beavers of Idaho.) This is the story of airlifting beavers, but it’s also the story of […]

Tags: back matter refrain scientific process Sleeping Bear

13Sep

Noah Webster’s Fighting Words

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

There has been a lot of Noah Webster love in kid lit lately. In 2015 there were two Noah Webster picture book biographies, Noah Webster and His Words and W is for Webster. And now comes a third, Noah Webster’s Fighting Words. I wouldn’t have thought there was room for yet another Webster biography, but I was thoroughly […]

Tags: American Revolution Millbrook

6Sep

Becoming Bach

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Nonfiction can’t be in first person unless it’s an autobiography. But historical fiction can use a first person speaker. In Becoming Bach Tom Leonard uses a first person speaker–Bach himself!–to explore the emotional roots of the world’s most beloved music. The events depicted in the story are all historically accurate, but Leonard uses his imagination to […]

Tags: 17th Century musicians Neal Porter Books

30Aug

Caroline’s Comets: A True Story

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Our family traveled to see the complete solar eclipse. An adventure story for another day! But that has had me thinking about the heavens and the people who explore them. One of those people was unlikely indeed. Caroline Herschel was an aristocratic woman, a spinster, in the eighteenth century. She spent most of her life […]

Tags: 18th century women scientists

23Aug

Waiting for Pumpsie

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I thrill to books about triumphal firsts in human rights–stories about the Emancipation Proclamation, stories about universal suffrage, stories about breaking the color barrier in sports, stories about making inter-racial marriages legal. Those are important stories that need to be told. But as recent events remind us, it takes time for society to change. Sometimes a […]

Tags: African American baseball

23Aug

Kids, Nature, and Public Parks: An Interview with Jack Shu

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Interview

When I was researching my book Mountain Chef I met a remarkable and charismatic outdoorsman, Jack Shu. Jack is the founder of the annual Sing Peak Pilgrimage. I’ve loved talking to him about public parks and kids and am thrilled to share his thoughts here. You worked for years in California state parks. What insights did […]

Tags: national parks

16Aug

Cover reveal for Girl Running

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I’m thrilled that the cover reveal for my new book, Girl Running, is happening today on the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge. Hop on over to Mrs. Knott’s Book Nook to see it! Girl Running will be on bookshelves on February 6, 2018. The art in Girl Running is collage. There’s a rich history of collage art in picture […]

Tags: collage art

9Aug

The Hawk of the Castle

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Kings…princesses…castles. The Hawk of the Castle appeals to all of those fairy tale elements, but it’s full of nonfiction content. It uses a fictional narrator (“This is me. This is my father.”) to explain how falcons and hawks were used in medieval times for hunting. The text is in verse reminiscent of “This is the House […]

Tags: back matter Candlewick family history layered text rhyme

2Aug

Carter G. Woodson Award

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I’m doing somersaults of joy that my book Mountain Chef, has been named the Carter G. Woodson Award winner at the elementary school level by the National Council of Social Studies. The award is intended to highlight books that depict the real lived experience of ethnic and racial minorities in the […]

Tags: award winners

26Jul

John Deere, That’s Who!

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Until recently I’ve always lived in big cities or their suburbs. A few years ago, though, our family moved to the country. We don’t live on a farm, but I quickly learned that farm machinery, farm tools, and farm concerns (is the rain going to let up long enough for the wheat harvest?) loom large […]

Tags: Henry Holt inventor refrain

19Jul

Pedal Power

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I’m on the wonderful Kirby Larson’s blog talking about nonfiction back matter. Please visit! Our family lived in the Netherlands for several years. We owned a car but seldom used it. It was much, much easier to navigate our ancient town by bike than by car, and with bikes parallel parking was never an issue […]

Tags: activism environmentalism Farrar Straus Giroux

12Jul

Keith Haring The Boy Who Just Kept Drawing

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Keith Haring: The Boy Who Just Kept Drawing is a picture book biography of the contemporary artist by an author with unmatched access to information about his childhood. It’s written by Haring’s younger sister. The book takes full advantage of that family knowledge, focusing on his childhood. The first third of the book is about him […]

Tags: artists Dial Books for Young Readers family history refrain

5Jul

Rhino in the House

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Rhino in the House tells the story of an environmentalist I’d never before heard of. Anna Merz found her retirement to Kenya took an unexpected turn when she began to worry about the safety of the rhinoceroses around her. They were being poached and becoming more and more endangered. So she set up a rhinoceros refuge. […]

Tags: Abrams animals research

28Jun

I Like, I Don’t Like

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I Like, I Don’t Like, an imported nonfiction picture book from Italy, is a brief (85 words), elegantly designed book inspired by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Every spread has, on the left side, a child doing some normal childlike activity. On the right side of the spread, a child in poverty is […]

Tags: compare and contrast Eerdmans

21Jun

Martina & Chrissie

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

“History” means something different to an 8 year old than to a 58 year old. What is “memory” for me is definitely “history” to him. Martina & Chrissie: The Greatest Rivalry in the History of Sports fits into that gap nicely. It tells the story of the rivalry between tennis greats Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert […]

Tags: Candlewick narrative voice sports

14Jun

Fancy Party Gowns

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

In Fancy Party Gowns I loved learning about one of those fascinating people from the corner of history–someone who changed a little bit of the world but who isn’t widely known. This is a book about a fashion designer, Ann Cole Lewis, who created a career for herself out of designing and producing high end dresses. […]

Tags: African American biography fashion little bee books

7Jun

Strange Fruit

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

This is one of those books I wish I’d written. It’s the powerful account of a song, “Strange Fruit,” how it came to be written, how it came to be sung, and the power it exerted on its audience. I first heard “Strange Fruit” when my husband, a law professor, was preparing a lecture on […]

Tags: civil rights Millbrook music

31May

Lighter than Air

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Balloons! Fancy hats! Napoleon! All this plus female empowerment. Lighter than Air: Sophie Blanchard, the First Woman Pilot is a biography of an eighteenth century woman balloonist. As Matthew Clark Smith warns in the back matter, “I was forced to use my imagination in describing Sophie’s childhood.” But he grounds it in real events of […]

Tags: aviation biography Candlewick women

A boy sits under a tree conversing with a dragon. The dragon appears to be part of the tree.

24May

John Ronald’s Dragons

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

John Ronald’s Dragons is a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, focusing on the parts of his life that inspired his fantasy writing. The book invites you to see Gandalf in a headmaster who smoked a pipe, dragon’s smoke in the smoke pouring out of smokestacks in an industrial city, and the frightening Mines of Moria in World […]

Tags: back matter Roaring Brook Press writers

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