Rebecca Bond

A friend gave us copies of The Great Donut Parade (which my daughter still quotes from) and Just Like a Baby, both published by Houghton Mifflin. Both are just teeming with sweetness. In The Great Donut Parade, small Billy leads an increasingly loud and large parade as town, attracting ever more followers with the donut he tied to his belt with a string. (It’s also in metered poetry, so it’s intensely fun to read). In Just Like A Baby, my daughter’s favorite bedtime book for months and months, a family prepares for the arrival of a new baby by making things by hand: a cradle, a mobile, a quilt. Bond lives in Jamaica Plain, and she illustrates her own books.

Mil Niepold

Niepold,’s Oooh! Matisse and Oooh! Picasso are beautiful, crisp ways to introduce your child to the basic compositional elements these two painters use in their work. Niepold presents close-ups of objects featured in the artists’ actual paintings, and asks “what’s this?” A violin? Yellow rays of sunshine? A bright and engaging way to introduce even young children to art. The books also lend themselves to craft projects with construction paper cut-outs, perfect for rainy summer days. Niepold lives in Belmont, and works as a senior mediator with the Consensus Building Institute.

Peter Reynolds

Author of picture books The Dot, and its sequel, Ish, (Candlewick Press), Peter Reynolds, like Bond, is both author and illustrator. With fiery and loose drawings reminiscent of Quentin Blake, Reynolds explores issues around creativity and passion. He and his family own Blue Bunny Books and Toys, in Dedham.

And a couple for older kids:

Anna Staniszewski

Author of My Very Un-Fairy Tale Life (published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky) and winner of the prestigious writer-in residence in children’s literature at the Boston Public Library in 2006, Anna Staniszewski was born in Poland and grew up in Westborough, MA.  My Very Un-Fairy Tale Life is equal parts adventure story and fantasy, and a great read for chapter book readers in fourth or fifth grade. Her writing reminds me of a Lisa Frank binder folder, bursting with rainbows and Technicolor unicorns. You’ll also find dragons, gnomes, frogs, and a heroine who isn’t afraid to kick butt.

The Middle School Students at Mission Hill School, Roxbury

A Place for me in the world: people talk about the work they love

So, this isn’t a conventional book, but I have been a huge fan of 826 Boston since its opening, and one of my favorite things about the organization is how it provides real vehicles for aspiring young writers to see their own work in published form. This collection  contains interviews of forty-five mostly local workers, including Mayor Menino, conducted and transcribed by middle school students at Mission Hill School. There is so much awesome contained within these pages, in part because it’s such an authentic project—students actually learned something about a profession—but also because the product reveals their own growing understanding of the world around them.