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

30Nov

Seeing Things

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Photographs were an important resource for me in writing my book Mountain Chef, about a 1915 camping trip. Recently I spent three days sharing some of those photos with a fourth grade class and helping them explore how photos can be used to research and to inspire their writing. I was struck by how visually attuned […]

Tags: aperture photographs

23Nov

The Marvelous Thing that Came from a Spring

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

(My review of a nonfiction middle grade title, Super Gear, was on Nerdy Book Club earlier this week. You can see it here.) Chance. Serendipity. Accident. The Marvelous Thing that Came from a Spring: The Accidental Invention of theToy that Swept the Nation shows that the process of creating something new may start with an accident, but […]

Tags: Atheneum inventor

16Nov

The Music in George’s Head

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

The Music in George’s Head: George Gershwin Creates Rhapsody in Blue is an elegantly-structured story. The book has three main parts. First, we learn about the many types of music Gershwin listened to as a boy. For example, “He just couldn’t stop thinking about Melody in F, a classical tune he’d heard at the penny arcade.” He […]

Tags: Calkins Creek musicians structure

9Nov

I Dissent

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Let’s turn away from the executive branch of government for a minute and think about the judiciary. I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark is a delightful picture book biography that is organized around a principle central to Justice Ginsburg’s work on the bench and, in fact, to all the workings of representative democracy: disagreeing […]

Tags: biography Simon & Schuster theme

2Nov

Across America to Win the Vote

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Election day is next week. In the relentless frenzy over this election, I try to remember how many women fought for my right to vote. Mara Rockliff’s book Around America to Win the Vote: Two Suffragists, a Kitten, and 10,000 Miles is a light-hearted, fun look at what women were willing to do to change hearts and […]

Tags: back matter Candlewick

26Oct

Be the Change

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Book trailer Review

In Be the Change, one of Gandhi’s grandchildren reminisces about his experiences with his famous grandfather, learning to understand his teaching that wastefulness leads to violence. This is no walk-to-the-sea story but instead the memory of a grandpa being disappointed when his grandson throws away the nub of a pencil. He makes the boy search until […]

Tags: Atheneum family history memoir

19Oct

Can I Eat That?

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Can I Eat That? is a clever nonfiction picture book for very young readers. Yes, it’s partly about what counts as food and what doesn’t. But it is every bit as much about wordplay and verbal gymnastics. The book is structured around questions: “Can I eat a potato?…a tomato?…a tornado?” With the page turn, we […]

Tags: Phaidon wordplay

12Oct

Ada’s Ideas

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Book trailer Review

At last, Ada Byron Lovelace is getting some recognition. Last year, Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine came out to critical acclaim. This year Ada’s Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer was published by Abrams. Both books cover some of the same basic facts about Lovelace: her parents were a poet […]

Tags: Abrams

5Oct

Seven and a Half Tons of Steel

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Picture book readers are young. Very, very young. Their entire lives they’ve had a black president. They’ve never known a world without smart phones. September 11, 2001 is ancient history to them–it happened long, long before they were born. So when you’re writing a nonfiction picture book, how do you provide context without making most […]

Tags: Peachtree scaffolding

28Sep

The Tree in the Courtyard

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

The Tree in the Courtyard is another nonfiction picture book that uses fictional elements to tell a nonfiction story. Here, the story of Anne Frank’s experience of hiding from the Nazis is told from the point-of-view of the horse chestnut tree growing in the courtyard outside her hiding place. The story is written in the […]

Tags: fictional elements Knopf World War II

21Sep

Nonfiction content in fictional picture books

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Nonfiction is nonfiction and fiction is fiction. But sometimes picture books use a fictional framework to present nonfiction content. Sometimes that’s called historical fiction, but sometimes it’s something else entirely. The thing without a name. In The Artist and Me, Shane Peacock imagines a child who is a neighbor to Vincent Van Gogh and, along with […]

Tags: back matter fictional elements Nancy Paulsen Books Owlkids Books

14Sep

Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson and Super-soakers

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

[Quick note before today’s book: There is a giveaway of my book, Mountain Chef, today at “From the Mixed-Up Files.” Come on over and enter!] In Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson’s Super-soaking Stream of Inventions, Chris Barton paints a portrait of the temperament of an inventor. We watch Lonnie Johnson from his childhood on up facing the problems of creating […]

Tags: Charlesbridge inventor

7Sep

Coyote Moon

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Wild predators thrill kids. Have you ever checked out the library shelves about lions, tigers, and alligators? Usually there are scant pickings. But how often do we think about the predators that live among us? Coyote Moon is a beautiful exploration of urban wildlife. The book is organized around spare sentences using vivid language to […]

Tags: language Page turn wildlife

31Aug

Steamboat School, Inspired by a True Story

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Kids deserve to know about amazing, courageous people from the past. But sometimes the historical record is too sketchy to tell a strictly nonfiction story about a real event. That’s where historical fiction comes in–writers can tell a story that conveys a historical truth without having the life sucked out of the story by the […]

Tags: African American Disney-Hyperion historical fiction

24Aug

Some Bugs for Preschoolers

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Nonfiction for very, very young readers is tricky. But Angela DiTerlizzi cracks the code in the delightful book Some Bugs. In fewer than 100 words, she gives us a wonderful glimpse of the wide variety of things insects can do. The wonderful rhymes give the book a feeling of playfulness. Some bugs sting. Some bugs bite. […]

Tags: animals Beach Lane

17Aug

Prairie Dog Song

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Elementary school children learn about living webs–that plants and animals interact with each other within an environment. There are some great books depicting ecosystem webs–High Tide for Horseshoe Crabs looks at the interactions of animals around Delaware Bay, No Monkeys, No Chocolate examines the interactions of animals and plants in the rain forest, Tree of Wonder explores […]

Tags: back matter enviro layered text Lee & Low

10Aug

Rich Lo and the art of Mountain Chef

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Uncategorized

Last week my nonfiction picture book, Mountain Chef: How One Man Lost His Groceries, Changed His Plans, and Helped Cook up the National Park Service, was published. Some of the process of creating the book was just what I expected: I spent time in archives, poring over crumbling newspapers and gazing at hundred-year old photographs, I […]

3Aug

Mountain Chef

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

The National Park Service is 100 years old this month. Who created it? Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir may be its spiritual fathers, but Muir had already died and Roosevelt was long out of power before the National Park Service was created. There were many people–some of them famous and some of them not–who actually […]

Tags: Charlesbridge chinese american

27Jul

The Hole Story of the Doughnut

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

The origins of some everyday objects are lost. But in The Hole Story of the Doughnut, Pat Miller goes back to a 1916 newspaper article to unearth the story of the doughnut’s beginning. It’s actually a humble tale. A sixteen year old ship’s cook experimented with a way to get rid of the undercooked center of […]

Tags: Houghton Mifflin inventor

20Jul

Diana’s White House Garden

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

This charming book tells the true story of how a little girl helped with Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s White House Victory garden during World War II. Diana Hopkins lived in the White House with her father, the president’s chief advisor. Eager to do her part to help the nation fight its war, Diana ended […]

Tags: Viking World War II

6Jul

Slickety Quick

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Sharks and poetry. What could be better? In this refreshing book, Skila Brown couples playful, inventive poems with short sidebars about different types of sharks. The poems are in a range of styles. There’s a poem for two voices (about a shark and the remora that cleans it), rhyming poems, shape poems, and poems with […]

Tags: animals Candlewick poetry

29Jun

Will’s Words

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

If you were transported back 400 years to Elizabethan England, it’s possible you’d have a tough time tuning your ear to the accent spoken around you. But if you slipped into the Globe Theatre to catch a play by that popular Shakespeare fellow, you’d feel amazement at how many words and phrases you still use. […]

Tags: Charlesbridge

24Jun

Women in the Spotlight

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Links

Still looking for summer reading? My list of nonfiction picture books about women performers is still up at CYBILS.

22Jun

My Heart Will Not Sit Down

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Some picture books are straight fiction. Some picture books are straight nonfiction. And then there are a few, like Mara Rockliff’s My Heart Will Not Sit Down, that straddle that line. As the author’s note explains, “In 1931, the city of New York received a gift of $3.77 to feed the hungry. It came from the […]

Tags: historical fiction Knopf

15Jun

The Kid from Diamond Street

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I love stories about gutsy women. I love stories about gutsy kids. Here’s a book about both–a gutsy girl. Edith Houghton loved baseball. But in the 1920s there were no Little League teams for girls. Didn’t matter. She kept playing, and when she was 10 years old (ten!) she joined a professional team. She was […]

Tags: biography Houghton Mifflin Harcourt quotations sports

7Jun

Super Gear: Nanotechnology and Sports Team Up

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Super Gear: Nanotechnology and Sports Team Up is just the book you want around during the Olympics. And it will appeal to sports-obsessed middle schoolers anytime. It tackles the fascinating world of nanotechnology, explaining what nanotechnology is, describing how it’s used in sports equipment, and delving into some of the ethical questions this new science […]

Tags: narrative voice science

1Jun

Anything But Ordinary Addie

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

In Anything but Ordinary Addie, lush illustrations and sparkling text tell the story of unconventional Adelaide Herrmann, who embarked on a career without her family’s knowledge, proposed to her husband, and transitioned from magician’s assistant to successful stage magician upon the death of her husband. I loved the story of this gutsy woman. Rockliff keeps […]

Tags: biography Candlewick invented dialogue

25May

Crossing Niagara

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

This is the story of the multiple crossings which tightrope walker Blondin made of Niagara Falls in 1859 and 1860. Usually, picture books about historical events look at the events through the eyes of the main character. This story is told differently. Instead of looking at what happens through Blondin’s eyes, we watch what happens […]

Tags: artwork biography Candlewick

18May

Ada’s Violin

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

“Ada Rios grew up in a town made of trash.” This story tells what happened just a few years ago when an amateur musician offered to teach the children of Paraguayan trash-pickers how to play instruments. He had some guitars and violins, but not enough for Ada and all the interested children. The parents, who […]

Tags: musicians recycling simon&schuster

11May

The Secret Subway

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I wish I’d written this book. I love the topic–someone secretly built a subway under New York City in 1870?!? Who? How? Why didn’t I know about it before? Shana Corey answers all those questions in her delicious retelling of Alfred Ely Beach’s innovative engineering feat and shrewd political wrangling (shrewd until the moment it […]

Tags: biography quotations scaffolding Schwartz & Wade social history structure

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