Post Kids Books

We only learned of Imai's exquisite 2014 picture book when her fellow author Sanae Ishida made it one of her holiday gift recommendations for us, but it ended up being one of our surprise hits of the... (Tom)

Phinney Mother Bruce Full credit to our storyteller Steph for spotting right away how hilarious Mother Bruce is, which we have since confirmed with extensive field-testing among kids and adults (the a... (Tom)

Betty Bunny Loves Chocolate Cake by Michael B. Kaplan and Stéphane Jorisch A customer tipped us off to this recent gem, which makes me laugh every single time, not just for Betty herself, stuffing a s... (Tom)

We dipped back into an earlier Kids' Book of the Week pick for the first time for our Phinney by Post Kids selection this month, for this one-of-a-kind horizontal picture book, which presents sometime... (Tom)

It took hearing Steph read this at Friday storytime for me to realize what a brilliantly constructed little book it is. "One day I went to school. I came home. The end." "One day I made something. I g... (Tom)

The X-ACTO-bladed papercuts of Nikki McClure are so recognizable a Northwest product that you half expect that grammar-school children, asked to memorize state products in a way they surely no longer... (Tom)

Really, there's almost no way to choose among A Girl and Her Gator and the linked picture books by Bryan and Murphy that precede and follow it, each with its own similarly inexplicable but ultimately... (Tom)

You don't need to know that Have You Seen My Trumpet? completes Escoffier and Di Giacomo's "Word-Play Trilogy" (after Take Away the A and Where's the Baboon?) to understand that it's a total hoot. The... (Tom)

"Du is tak?" What does that mean? "Ma nazoot." Huh?! What are these bugs saying about the green, growing thing before them? After a few readings of what looks like nonsense at first, I think you and y... (Tom)

Grandad, a well-dressed bulldog, can't find a few things in his cluttered old house. Can you help him? Imagine Where's Waldo, but illustrated by William Morris or Neo Rauch: this is the best kind of s... (Tom)

The Caldecotts, like the Oscars, don't often go to comedy, but this funny book was one of this year's Caldecott Honor winners, and deservedly so. It's written and drawn in the style of a traditional R... (Tom)

Noisy Night by Mac Barnett and Brian Biggs If urban density is the new watchword of our 21st-century boomtown, perhaps we should all take a look at Barnett and Biggs's unlikely ode to apartment living... (Tom)

The classic conceit of Harold and the Purple Crayon—a boy's drawings come to life as he creates them—is entirely transformed in Lehrer's new book. Lehrer brings his own wit to the story, but best of a... (Tom)

Our neighbor Laura McGee Kvasnosky, with many children's books to her name, has collaborated on this charming picture book with her sister Kate: a father-son tale, set in familiar Western landscapes,... (Tom)

This Is How We Do It is not the first book to show kids how other kids around the world live, but it's a particularly thoughtful and appealing approach. Using photographs and descriptions sent to him... (Tom)

This is the month for monsters, and you'll find few more appealing ones than the father and child in this rhyming tale. The rhythms and the rhymes are note-perfect for reading aloud, and the monstrous... (Tom)

Oliver Jeffers has written and drawn many picture books and illustrated others, including the colossally popular The Day the Crayons Quit, but his new one feels special: a welcome message written to i... (Tom)

Should I be embarrassed to love a picture book that's a spinoff of a viral YouTube video? (Actually a sequel to a spinoff.) Because I'm not. Marcel's quirky, squeaky sweetness survives its translation... (Tom)

How did I only recently learn about this wonderful picture book from 1964? Created by Remy Charlip (a design and choreography collaborator with Merce Cunningham and John Cage and—fun fact!—the physica... (Tom)

Plenty of kids' books introduce young readers to colors, but few do what Tamaki's beautiful book does so subtly: show that color depends on perspective (why does blue water turn clear when it runs thr... (Tom)

To Amundsen and Zheng He and Armstrong and the list of other great explorers add our two young heroes, who decide to go on an expedition. They set up a tent in the backyard, bring treats (and when tho... (Tom)

One sign of how much Lin's new picture book feels like a timeless classic is how surprising it is to turn to the book's last pages and learn that the fable she tells—of a girl whose nighttime nibbles... (Tom)

The duo behind Last Stop at Market Street, the rare picture book weighty enough to win the Newbery Medal, returns with another story balancing melancholy and hope. It's Carmela's birthday, and she get... (Tom)

Harold's woolly hat is indeed special. Made up of nine strokes of Vern Kousky's paintbrush, five red and four yellow, plus a little dab of blue at the teetering-over top, it's the kind of deliciously... (Tom)

It's our third straight snowy selection for Phinney by Post Kids, and finally it reflects the local weather (and how). That little thumbnail image of the cover can hardly do justice to the intricate b... (Tom)

Beaty and Roberts have become picture-book superstars for their ongoing series about brilliantly ambitious youngsters—Rosie Revere, Iggy Peck, Ada Twist, and, coming soon, Sofia Valdez. And for good r... (Tom)

In the admirable title-that-sums-up-the-story tradition of The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars, the story of this goofy, Day-Glo counting book is just that: if you can only draw worms, well, yo... (Tom)

Robinson's first solo picture book, after his collaborations with Matt de la Pena (the Newbery-winning Last Stop on Market Street) and Kelly DiPucchio (our beloved Gaston), is a quietly mind-blowing l... (Tom)

Wenzel returns to the same premise as in his Caldecott Honor winner, They All Saw a Cat—everyone brings their own perspective to the same thing—but for me there's something even more evocative about m... (Tom)

The Jolly Postman, by the British married duo, the Ahlbergs, was a throwback when it was published in the '80s and seems even more so now, but its inventiveness remains, with letters between Mother Go... (Tom)

One more time hearing Steph's masterful storytime rendition of this tale of a small Western town beset by bandits and saved by a young paleontologist (who arrives, slowly, on a tortoise) convinced me... (Tom)

The work of a scarecrow is lonely: your job is to keep things away from your fields. But when a baby crow, lost and lonely itself, lands nearby, this scarecrow ignores his job description and leans do... (Tom)

A Big Mooncake for Little Star was my favorite picture book last year, and Lin has followed it with a companion book that is a perfect match for its feeling that you have stepped into a timeless fable... (Tom)

There are counting books, and then there are counting books! With elegance and imagination and, finally, an extremely long foldout page, Völker demonstrates, in concrete terms, the difference between... (Tom)

We loved the art and story of Mora's first picture book, Thank You, Omu, but might like her new one even more. It's a simple tale of a shared routine between mother and daughter in a busy life, of mod... (Tom)

As anyone who reads kids books out loud knows, not every rhyming picture book has rhymes that really sing. But Colin Meloy, the singer and songwriter of the Decembrists, knows how to compose a singabl... (Tom)

The Little Island We usually choose new picture books for Phinney by Post Kids, but when this one—which I had never seen before, even though it was written by Margaret Wise Brown and won a Caldecott i... (Tom)

Christian Robinson's name keeps popping up on the covers of our favorite picture books (Gaston, Last Stop on Market Street, and Another, to name a few), and here his sprightly, generous illustrations... (Tom)

Skulls, glorious skulls! You might think of this as a scary Halloween book (it is October, after all), but really it's a wonderfully unscary celebration of that big, well-shaped bone in your head, a "... (Tom)

And you think the old lady who swallowed a fly had problems! What starts with a little gum stuck in your hair soon grows until there are scissors, a vacuum, and a rabbit (and much more) up there. Adam... (Tom)

Loomis takes the cadence and concept of "The House That Jack Built" and makes them her own with a wonderfully rhythmic and evocative story of traditions of Hawaiian food, land, and farming, writing of... (Tom)

Our weekend-long Seattle snowfest is already fading into memory, but you can evoke snow's wondrous sensory transformations with this lovely celebration of the sounds—Ploompf! Thwomp!—of winter, which... (Tom)

The Lights and Types of Ships at Night by Dave Eggers and Annie Dills Those former and current bedtime-readers among you likely are aware how difficult it can be to turn a much-loved fact book (e.g.,... (Tom)

What is the proper level of preposterousness for a picture book, especially one about a piece of toast that thinks it's a dog? Whatever it is, Sarah Hwang hits the perfect balance of logic and absurdi... (Tom)

Amid all the bright colors and exclamation points in our picture-book section, you might overlook this lovely, but more subdued, item. Illustrated mostly in muted grays and browns, and featuring a rab... (Tom)

Cat and Mouse live in the same house, and things are good, with a few exceptions. Mouse wants to eat gingersnaps, and Cat wants to eat Mouse. Mouse wants to lie in the sun, and so does Cat. After eati... (James)

In her 40s, Baek has already become the first Korean to win the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Award, and with Moon Pops, her first book in English, it's easy to see why. For her illustrations, she build... (Tom)

Does the cover of Time Is a Flower make you think of an early '80s jazzercise VHS tape, or a late '70s Gail Sheehy bestseller? Open it anyway, and you'll find a wonderfully evocative and open-ended ap... (Tom)

Cobwebs? Check. Creaky doors? Check. Squeaky stairs, rattling pipes, flickering lights? Check, check, and check. What house wants to be haunted, because who would want to live in a haunted house? Well... (Tom)

It may not be the best time of year for camping, but Mann's picture book, a recent winner of the Washington State Book Award, is a warm, funny, and relatable story of just what its title says, young E... (Tom)