The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2024

When I first started compiling this year-end book list, my daughters were 3 years and just 6 months old, and my main duties were feeding and chasing them around. But now that they are 10 and 7, I have taken on a new role: social coordinator. This new phase of parenthood is full of play dates and sleepovers, drop-offs and pickups. When I get overwhelmed by the logistics of it all, I remind myself of all the good that comes from their budding social lives. The simple act of being in someone else’s home is expanding their worldview.

Many of this year’s best children’s books give a glimpse, in their own ways, into how other people live. Matt Lamothe and Jenny Volvovski’s All About U.S. quite literally steps into the homes and daily lives of 50 American kids, one from each state. Xin Li’s I Lived Inside a Whale brings readers into the quiet space of a young girl who finds the world too loud and busy. And Stephanie Seales’ My Daddy Is a Cowboy whisks them away on a sunrise horseback ride, so that they may imagine what it’s like to be an urban cowboy.

In a review of All About U.S. for School Library Journal, Cat McCarrey writes something that could be said of several of the titles I’ve selected for this year: “It’s impossible to read this and come away with anything but connection and love for other people.”

What’s better than that?

All About U.S. by Matt Lamothe with Jenny Volvovski

The cleverly titled All About U.S. is a sequel of sorts to a personal favorite, Matt Lamothe’s 2017 book, This Is How We Do It. While the original looks at one day in the lives of seven kids from around the world, from what they eat at breakfast to how they get to school, their chores, and where they sleep at night, All About U.S. spotlights 50 American kids, one from each state, each with engaging illustrations by Lamothe.

“Our goal for this book was to create an authentic portrait of the country, showcasing the diversity of its people and the vastness of its natural landscapes,” write Lamothe and co-author Jenny Volvovski in a foreword. “To accomplish this, we looked at data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and Pew Research Center tracking factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, family structure, income, religion, schools and housing across the country. We then did our best to match the demographics of the featured families with those of the United States.”

The “grandiose and ambitious project,” as School Library Journal calls it, began in the fall of 2020. The authors followed a methodical process: interview the children and their parents or guardians by video chat, collect kid-narrated home tours, and request reference photos related to hobbies and different elements in their homes. As a result, the profiles in the book, each consisting of a story and a detailed illustration, are “unflinchingly honest.” Seven-year-old Destiny, of Connecticut, helps her mom, Maribel, who has rheumatoid arthritis, get dressed and navigate the apartment a social worker helped them land after years of homelessness. Nine-year-old Ronan, of Oregon, splits kindling to heat the wood stove in the one-room yurt he shares with his mother and sister. Eleven-year-old Betsy, of Alabama, is reprimanded for reading while driving her motorized wheelchair.

When I read this book with my own 7-year-old, she was all in, asking for “one more” as we traveled around the country over a stretch of days, meeting Hi’ilani from Hawaii, Noah from Texas and Sati from Vermont. When we finished, she even wrote her own—complete with a sketch of her treasured Ninjaline obstacle course in the yard.

Gaga Mistake Day by Emma Straub and Susan Straub

When my firstborn started to talk, she named my mother-in-law Gaga. It was her attempt at Grandma, of course, and it stuck. Gaga is Gaga to this day, and I don’t see that changing.

So naturally, when I saw Emma and Susan Straub’s new book, Gaga Mistake Day, I was intrigued by this other Gaga. The story, written by a mother-daughter team, follows a free-spirited grandmother babysitting her granddaughter. Gaga calls the cats by the wrong names, plays Connect Four by her own rules, makes wacky lunches, walks backward to the park and reads books upside-down. When the granddaughter, as narrator, notes her parents’ disapproval of Gaga feeding her marshmallows before dinner and adding too many bubbles to the bath, Gaga tells her, “Mistakes are fun, aren’t they?”

“In order to be a grandparent, you need an intermediary, that pesky sandwiched mother or father, who is dealing with both their parents and their children at the same time,” Emma Straub writes on Oprah Daily. But as parents, we can try too hard to control things.

“The message here is that more grown-ups should make the ‘mistake’ of loosening up a bit,” explains Kirkus Reviews.

TV host Jenna Bush Hager agrees. “It really is about just letting grandparents be grandparents,” she gushed, of the book, on NBC’s “Today.”

My Daddy Is a Cowboy by Stephanie Seales

Stephanie Seales’ new book My Daddy Is a Cowboy is an “absolute joyride,” Booklist declares. In it, a father wakes his daughter before dawn to enjoy a sunrise horseback ride through their city—some cherished “‘just us’ time.”

Seales, a California-born daughter of Panamanian immigrants, set out to put her heritage into her book. Award-winning illustrator C.G. Esperanza beautifully captures the emotions of these characters in his vibrant, thick-stroked oil paintings, and their roots in details like the Panamanian flag on Abuelita’s coffee mug and the mola blanket on a horse.

Seales admits in an interview with School Library Journal that she isn’t a horse person, but she’s fascinated by urban cowboys and how they are making horseback riding more accessible to city kids. “I was heavily inspired by the Compton Cowboys,” says Seales. The group of Black men and women rides horses from a small ranch in a semirural enclave in Compton, a city just south of Los Angeles, keeping Black cowboy culture alive. The father in My Daddy Is a Cowboy is similarly looking to pass a tradition on to the next generation.

Seales’ words, which capture the perspective of an adoring young girl, in combination with Esperanza’s vivid depiction of this special father-daughter moment against the backdrop of a sky changing from “midnight black” to “deep ocean blue” to “swirly sherbet colors,” deliver a picture book that, as Booklist puts it, is “sure to delight cowboys both real and imagined.”

Animal Albums from A to Z by Cece Bell

Author and illustrator Cece Bell uses the introduction in her new book, Animal Albums from A to Z, to convince young readers that a handful of recording studios, from the 1940s to 1980s, actually released albums created by animal musicians. Then, she fully commits to the bit, making this fiction a reality.

Sparing no details, Bell designed an album cover and wrote the lyrics to a track for each letter of the alphabet. The album and song titles are alliterative—from “My Aromatic Armpit Is Astonishing to All” on Arnie Dillow’s Accordion Americana to “You Snooze, You Ooze” on the Zydeco Zebras’ Zigzag Zinnia.

“I tried to find different genres for each letter of the alphabet, and I tried to pick fonts that sort of fit that genre because often albums of a certain time period kind of tend to look alike,” Bell, a vinyl collector, tells Candlewick Press. “I got so far into it that I decided that everything, all the art and even all the lettering, needed to be made by hand, either painted or cut out.”

But Bell’s creative juices kept flowing. She wrangled more than 60 different musicians to record the songs she’d written. Inside the book, readers can scan a QR code to listen to them. She’s even working on MTV-style music videos.

It’s no wonder that Animal Albums was named one of this year’s Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award winners by the New York Times Book Review and the New York Public Library.

BookPage called it early, saying in April, “Animal Albums, which will surely go down as one of the year’s top picture books, is the best kind of weird and wonderful—from A to Z.”

Ernő Rubik and His Magic Cube by Kerry Aradhya

In honor of the Rubik’s Cube turning 50 this year, I am including science writer Kerry Aradhya’s picture book biography of the puzzle’s inventor, Ernő Rubik, on the list. Ernő Rubik and His Magic Cube tells the story of a little boy in post-World War II Budapest, fascinated by shapes and puzzles, who grows up to become a professor of architecture and design, making models to teach his students about three-dimensional objects. Little did Rubik know that one such model would become a beloved toy, with more than 450 million selling worldwide.

In a simple, straightforward narrative, Aradhya chronicles Rubik’s trials and errors in making a cube consisting of 26 little “cubies” that twist and turn. The inventor experiments with rubber bands, paper clips and fishing line, until observing round pebbles along the Danube River leads to an “aha” moment, convincing him to attach the cubies to one round mechanical core. Kara Kramer’s illustrations, filled with the bright colors of the Rubik’s Cube and loads of shapes and geometric patterns, bring a delightful energy to the tale.

Treehouse Town by Gideon Sterer

For literal years, my oldest spent her free time in class sketching elaborate treehouses. Her take-home folder was chock full of architectural plans. She envisioned enclosed treehouses with porthole windows and platform treehouses with exit slides, ziplines and lots and lots of pulleys.

Last year, in one of our prouder parent moments, we actually built the girls a treehouse. While large in size, the “Eagles’ Nest” is rather simple in design. It has a platform with a rail, a ladder, and a crate that they can raise and lower with a pulley. We’ve contemplated adding a bell to ring if they see a black bear, which is a common occurrence in our part of New England.

For arboreal dreamers like mine, Gideon Sterer’s Treehouse Town is a sure win. The best-selling author’s frolicking verse sets the tone, inviting readers to explore a magical “kingdom raised on sticks and stilts.” But, as other reviews note, Charlie Mylie’s illustrations carry the story. With “marvelous use of color and light, Mylie has created a stunningly specific world,” writes Kirkus Reviews. His vision of Treehouse Town is brimming with imaginative contraptions, like crow’s nests for viewing, air trams, rope swings, trapdoors and sycamore slides.

As readers travel from Sap Street to Birch Bazaar, and ride the Tulip Train to Sunset Station, Publisher’s Weekly says, “Mylie’s detailed, page-filling drawings embed numerous mini-dramas into absorbing scenes.”

Kids are pouring paint into a fountain at Circus School, playing birdball in the sky tethered to birds, and washing dishes with an octopus. Young readers will surely want to climb into the pages of this book.

The Book That Can Read Your Mind by Marianna Coppo

“What if I told you that I could read your mind?” says Lady Rabbit in Marianna Coppo’s latest. The tuxedoed magician in The Book That Can Read Your Mind then asks you to choose one of 36 whimsical characters—a mushroom, a molar, a fork, an ace of spades, a cumulus cloud, and more—seated in a theater. (Shh! Keep your pick to yourself!) Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, you’re told which two-page spread to turn to next based on which of the six rows your character is in. On the next spread, the characters are shuffled around, and you are asked to once again identify the row your character is in and follow the instructions to a specific page and figure. The figure, resembling a playing card, reveals your character. Ta-da!

In the magic-trick-of-a-book’s afterword, Mariano Tomatis, curator and editor of the People’s Magic Library, credits mathematics and three magicians from centuries ago for the “ingredients” for Coppo’s book. “Old recipe,” as he calls it, or not, kids are guaranteed to be entertained.

The Iguanodon’s Horn by Sean Rubin

“This STEM treasure trove may start out with an iguanodon’s death and fossilization, but the book is anything but a downer,” writes Emily Graham for Booklist. Rather, Sean Rubin’s The Iguanodon’s Horn asks a mind-bending and thrilling question: How do we know what dinosaurs looked like?

The story illustrates a real-life story from 1822, when Mary Ann and Gideon Mantell discovered a large tooth in Sussex, England. They named the mysterious creature it came from Iguanodon, meaning “iguana tooth.” From there, the book follows a cast of historical characters, mostly paleontologists and paleoartists, as they imagine and reimagine what iguanodon could have looked like with each subsequent discovery found over 200 years.

In a style similar to the Magic School Bus books, Rubin’s “immersive illustrations put readers in the thick of things,” as Graham puts it, with informative sidebars, helpful labels and comical thought bubbles coming from the dinosaurs. Each page invites you to do your own digging.

Emergency Quarters by Carlos Matias

Carlos Matias’ Emergency Quarters speaks to ’90s kids, like myself, who are now parents. In the story, Ernesto finally becomes a “niño grande” when his parents allow him to walk the six blocks to school without them. Each morning, his mom hands him a quarter. “For emergencies, Ernesto,” she says. “If you need me, look for a pay phone.”

The whole look of the book is nostalgic. Gracey Zhang’s illustrations are a “comfortable mix between Sesame Street, Jack Prelutsky and Shel Silverstein,” writes Jill Lorenzini for BookPage. And Zhang even told Houston Public Media that her color palette was inspired by the iconic windbreakers of the era.

But Matias addresses his young readers directly in a note at the outset, explaining that before cellphones, there were pay phones on streets where you could make calls for 25 cents. And the rhythmically written story of Ernesto trying to save his emergency quarters as he’s tempted by baseball cards at Senor José’s bodega, arcade games at Manny’s Video Games, fruit juice from Senora Mayra, tamales from Dona Tania’s food truck, and Felipa’s empanadas, all along the route through his Queens, New York, neighborhood, speaks on many levels to kids today, too.

“Spending time with friends and sharing that little bit of independence. Hearing our parents’ reminders in our heads as we make decisions. And sometimes slipping up, knowing that even if the quarters aren’t plentiful, the love absolutely is,” Lorenzini adds.

I Lived Inside a Whale by Xin Li

A good fact can make a kid’s imagination run wild. Just take the young girl in Xin Li’s new book, I Live Inside a Whale. Early in the story, her narrator says, “I read about the blue whale. It is the largest animal on earth, with a heart so big that my dad could stand inside it.” The very thought of an adult standing inside of a cetacean’s organ gives the girl an idea. To escape the sensory overload she feels in the world, she’d build her very own whale, a secret hideout in her room where she could go to get some peace and quiet. The girl “settled into this quiet world,” until a young boy intrudes, pleading for her attention. Ultimately, he helps the girl find her voice, and her gift for storytelling, in what Publisher’s Weekly calls an “inspiring, unexpected interior journey.”

Megan Gambino | | READ MORE

Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.