Who is the king of interactive board books? It’s not like there is a fiefdom of illustrators and authors battling it out for supremacy a la Survivor. There is no tattooed ringleader with their arms outstretched asking the world whose house this is. These are interactive board books, the kind that toddlers, crawlers and pre-K kids love to paw over, pull their levers, wonder how the object on the page moves, and try their best to make the book unusable for future generations. Mermaid Dance is by the husband and wife team of Matthew Van Fleet and Mara Val Fleet. Matthew is the #1 New York Times Best Selling Author, behind Tails and Dog, as well as the Oscar the Octopus, Chomp Goes the Alligator, Dance, and more.
hardened souls who dislike all, Resistance is futile to this bookTag: Paula Wiseman Books
Mina, an illustrated book of whimsy and mirth that’s one of the year’s best
Lo, and the boat shall not be missed twice. In my mind, Vincent Price is saying those words to me as I read Mina. Mina is by author and illustrator Matthew Forsythe, the creator of one of our favorite illustrated books of all time, Pokko and the Drum. That book was released in 2019 and was on every one of the Top 10 Children’s Booklists that we saw from that year for good reason. Mina is the follow-up to that book and will receive many of the same accolades. They’re also well deserved. The combination of beautiful art, with the sublime, simple, and silly story will have audiences four and up in stitches.
Only nine more in our top-10 list for 2022 to go