A young girl visiting her grandmother in Japan narrates this not-so-traditional bath-time book about a very traditional and ancient Japanese custom. The narrator and her beloved baachan, along with a gaggle of aunties, take a walk to the neighborhood bath house, where they meet up with some smiling young cousins.
“A death is the end of one life, but it is also the beginning of many more.” This account of the life of a fox, by the creators of Moth: An Evolution Story (rev. 5/19), features the stages that rarely get attention: death and decomposition.
In this third graphic novel collaboration between Larson and Mock (Compass South, rev. 7/16;Knife’s Edge), what begins as a twentieth-century family drama quickly uncoils into a much more sinister and spellbinding modern fairy tale.
On a clear, starry night, everybody in a red brick apartment building is sound asleep. That is, until Baby Izzie sits up in her crib and starts to cry, “WaaaAAH!!” This sets off a chain reaction in which other residents are roused from their slumber and create noises of their own.
Just across the street from the Horn Book office sits the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose story is at least as interesting as its idiosyncratic collection. Cannily, Fleming and Cordell begin this picture-book biography with a mystery: “On a tree-lined street in Boston, in an old mansion, at the top of the stairs, in a second-floor room, empty frames hang, waiting…”