12 books we loved in January

I picked this one up wanting to see Eliza Wheeler’s work after reading about her online, and I was not disappointed. Her illustrations are inspiring as well as full of enticing detail that kept my 3-year-old asking questions and flipping back through the book many times. “Where is the bunny? Where is his bike? Why did the owl leave?”

The calm pacing and sweet characters made this short story a lot of fun to read. My husband and I laughed out loud at the fun little twist on the last page, and the linocut illustrations are delightful.

We live in a rather rambling old farmhouse ourselves, so my kids really enjoyed this tale and its likewise rambling, lyrical text and layered illustrations full of detail and surprise.

I’ll try not to take it personally how much my kids loved this story of a cat who wishes away his “grumpy” mom, “cranky” dad, and annoying siblings. Let’s hope they were connecting with the sweet message and return of the family!

My kids adore Stanley. He’s a prolific little hamster, running a farm and a diner and a grocery store and so on in the various titles. We’ve checked out all of the Stanley books many times and read them over and over. It’s to the point that my husband — a much sillier bedtime reader than I am — will often insert the Stanley structure into other books for a laugh from the kids. In addition to the “Time for supper. Time for bath. And time for bed!” refrain at the end of each book, there are beloved characters who appear in each and we love to see what Charlie, Little Woo, and the rest of the gang are up to each time.

I snagged this one off the shelf of new picture books because I’m a big Marla Frazee fan. The elevator scenes were great fun to pore over and it was cute to see how the story circled back to the beginning. Knowing Frazee often creates her own hand-lettered fonts, I have to wonder if the name of the title character is a nod to the font? Either way, the Great Zapfino is a fun guy to watch, whether at the circus or working as a bellboy.

My kids loved looking through the illustrations in this wordless picture book of a trio of siblings overcoming challenges to build sand castles at the beach. I was fascinated to see separate author credit on a wordless picture book. But when I looked up the author/illustrator team, I remembered enjoying their wordless story Over the Shop — clearly this duo works well together as storytellers!

From the dream team that created Dragons Love Tacos, this hilarious story held the attention of all my kids over and over. (And over.) I’m pretty sure my toddler has it memorized word for word. My favorite line in the book is “Sweet sassy molassy!” and that’s a great example of the tone of the story.

Short, sweet, and funny, this picture book was a delight to re-read to my littles who loved it.

I appreciated the little details that made this story fun to read again and again. The ending provided satisfying closure to the journey.

I grabbed this one off the shelf after I discovered Story Storm 2023 on Tara’s site. The story chock-full of puns and jokes was right up our alley. It’s super funny to read more than once and catch more witticisms on the subsequent reads.

I’ll admit it took me a re-read to fully understand what exactly what was happening in this picture book. I think my 3-year-old is still confused about which events really happened and which were simply imagined. But my husband and I both fell for the expressive little pup and everyone in the family loved his story of growing in resilience.