12 Must-Read April Children’s Book Releases

This is one of my daughter’s favorite books right now. We’ve been reading it endlessly (ba-dum-ching). If you love chose-your-path books but need something for a younger audience, this is a must! The book opens with Little Red Riding Hood’s mother telling her to take a cake to her sick grandmother. The reader’s first choice is which coat LRRH should wear — the stylish red cape or the warm faux fur? What proceeds is a mishmash of fairytales as LRRH journeys to grandmother’s house, often getting wildly sidetracked as readers make choice after choice. Amazingly, Snyder writes all 92 pages in rhyming verse! I am in awe. There are so many choices and options in this book. It’s one children will want to read endlessly.

Together We Ride is a simply written yet lyrical picture book about learning how to ride a bike. There’s lots to love in this one: a loving and supportive father/daughter relationship, its depiction of a child failing at something and getting back up to try again, and Kaylani Juanita’s expressive illustrations. Juanita is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite illustrators. She illustrated another book releasing this month that was on my longlist for this post — Racing Ace by Larry Dane Brimner, an early reader about a girl who loves to race cars. She also illustrated Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle, my favorite March picture book release. I had to include Together We Ride because it instigated a great conversation between my daughter and me about failure.

Karina Yan Glaser follows up her fantastic Vanderbeekers series with this complex but heartwarming standalone middle grade. After their father’s death, June, her sister Maybelle, and their mother move into Huey House, a homeless shelter. June’s Cantonese-speaking mother has shut down after her husband’s death and struggles to get moving every day. June wouldn’t mind living in the shelter so much if she could bring the viola her father gave her, but there’s a “no instruments” rule. However, one of the staff sneaks her viola into her. Tyrell is June’s age and has lived in the shelter with his mother for a few years. He’s always longed to play the violin, and with the help of June’s sister, they manage to both get musical lessons from a classical musician who lives next to the shelter. When city authorities decide to move all the shelter residents into permanent housing, June and Tyrell decide they must find a way to protest the move. Glaser bases the novel on her experiences working in New York City’s transitional housing.

Twelve-year-old Sai comes from an impoverished family and her father is a conman, but she longs for a different kind of life and sets out to fulfill her dreams by forging a different past for herself. She becomes an apprentice to the mapmaker Paiyoon and receives an opportunity of a lifetime: to travel on the ship Prosperity, captained by a war hero, and draw official maps of their voyage. The ship also aims to explore the mythical Sunderlands and the dragons they might find there. However, some of the ship’s crew know the secrets of her past, and if they were to come to light, she’d be ruined. This Thai-inspired swashbuckling fantasy is perfect for readers who love adventure stories.

Ornithologist and environmental activist Mya-Rose Craig’s first book is a collection of 30 biographies about young indigenous people and people of color fighting to protect the environment. Craig shows that indigenous people and people of color are disproportionally affected by climate change, yet non-white climate activists rarely receive the same attention as young white activists. Craig includes a broad range of activists, from Ecuadorian environmentalist Sumak Helena Sirén Gualinga, who protects the rainforest by standing against oil companies and deforestation, to Bangladeshi women’s rights and environmental activist Rebecca Sabnam, who advocates for zero waste in schools. Vibrant illustrations accompany these brief but powerful biographies.

Sixth grader Annabelle Blake starts the school year expecting everything to be just as boring as the year before, but when she meets the new kid, Bailey, her life becomes anything but boring. Bailey is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, and it’s the first time Annabelle has met anyone who’s nonbinary. She finds she’s more comfortable with Bailey than anyone she’s ever met, but when she introduces them to her family, her parents act weird, and Annabelle worries they might be homophobic. But then her parents reveal a secret that changes everything Annabelle thought she knew about her boring family. This latest middle grade novel by Stonewall Award winner Kyle Lukoff is a heartwarming read and great for younger middle grade readers.

Most days are a struggle for 11-year-old Ellis Earl Brown and his family, who live in rural Mississippi in 1967. His father died in a tractor accident years earlier, and now his large family struggles to find work and keep everyone fed. On top of that, their house frequently leaks, it’s impossible to leave when it rains due to flooding, and Ellis is constantly hungry. A bright spot for Ellis is school, and his teacher Mr. Foster does much to help Ellis and other students in his class, such as providing meals and driving them to and from school. He invites Ellis and four other students to greet Senator Robert Kenney and Civil Rights Activist Marian Wright, who are touring the rural South, at the airport when they arrive. Rich in character development and history, this is a beautiful historical middle grade about hanging onto hope in the midst of poverty and racism.

Valente’s Fairyland series is one of my all-time favorite fantasy middle grades, so I was delighted to find out she was writing another. Osmo Unknown lives a quiet life in Littlebridge Village, though he longs for adventure. When his hunter mother accidentally kills a Quidnunk — forest-dwelling intelligent creatures that have a treaty with Littlebridge — Osmo’s wish for adventure comes true, though he would never have chosen for it to happen in this way. Now, as the son of the hunter who broke the treaty, Osmo is given as a groom to the creature’s ghost, and he must journey to the mythic Eightpenny Woods, where Quidnik’s go after death, to find the ghost. A half-badger and half-wombat named Bonk and a pangolin named Never accompany him on his quest. While I’ve yet to snag a copy of this to read, I’m sure it will have Valente’s trademark lyrical prose and be steeped in folklore.