Great books for kids
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effect that has on her family and her comfortable lifestyle. I would compare Vail’s style to Judy Blume — in fact, she might even be her successor.” For nonfiction readers: “Ann Hodgman’s The House of a Million Pets really stands

out. It’s an account of the author’s experiences of sharing her home with pets ranging from the usual — dogs and cats — to the decidedly unusual — prairie dogs and pygmy mice. I’m also impressed with Jack Prelutsky’s Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry, a humorous, creative book that encourages and inspires children to write simple poems.”

Just how many children’s books do Stevenson and her colleagues at the Bulletin read each year? “We review about 900 books, and we read about 500 more on the way to deciding what’s worth reviewing,” she said. There is also some overlap reading of books for the Bulletin’s annual “Blue Ribbon List” and for starred reviews, “and we’re also reading outside of our Bulletin jobs. So we probably read about 1,500 titles a year of the new books. But that includes picture books, which don’t take us that long!” The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books began publishing the Guide Book to Gift Books: An Annotated List of Books for Youth in the winter of 2002. The Bulletin is affiliated with the Center for Children’s Books, a research collection of about 16,000 books for young readers. Both the Bulletin and the Center are part of the University of Illinois and its Graduate School of Library and Information Science, which is consistently ranked the No. 1 library school program in the nation.

In The Chicken of the Family Henrietta’s two older sisters love to tease her. When they try to convince her that she’s actually a chicken instead of a little girl, it’s pretty hard to believe at first.