Books like The Smeds and the Smoos
By Julia Donaldson
For families who want a launching pad to talk about difference and belonging, this space-set romance turns a big idea into something small enough for little ears to hold. Warm, hopeful, a little wild — a galactic adventure with a tender heart.
A witch famous throughout Russia for eating children is secretly a lonely old woman who longs for a grandchild, so she disguises herself as a village babushka to find one.
A zombie girl who loves to dance enrolls in a ballet class for human girls, but stage fright before her first recital makes her fear her moans and groans will scare everyone away.
A lonely old man sets out to find one pretty cat but can't choose among the millions, billions, and trillions he finds on a hillside — so he brings them all home.
When the Primm family moves into their new apartment on East 88th Street, they find a crocodile named Lyle living in the bathtub — and slowly, surprisingly, come to love him.
A small boy is invited to tea at the palace and always asks the same question — may he bring a friend? — and each time, a surprising animal guest shows up beautifully behaved.
Eight little ballerinas practice plié, relevé, and jeté together in perfect step until Miss Lina introduces a ninth dancer, Regina, and their tidy rows suddenly fall into disarray.
A gallery of animal families — ducks, pandas, hippos, tigers, and more — appears in framed portraits, each one showing a different way to be a family, from two moms to a kid with just a pet plant.
A friendly ghost named Leo loves drawing and making snacks, but when a new family misunderstands his attempts to help, he leaves home to find where he truly belongs.
Every night at six o'clock, a City Watch commander reads his little boy a farmyard picture book about cows and lambs, then starts reimagining it as a story about the city streets his son will actually grow up in.
At bedtime, a little boy asks his mama again and again — what if he were a smelly skunk, a meat-eating dinosaur, a swamp creature — and she answers every wild what-if with love.
A young girl with skin the color of midnight longs to be lighter like her mother and sister, until a shooting star's story about the sisters Night and Day changes how she sees herself.
After spotting three dazzling mermaids on the subway, a boy transforms his home into a lagoon of imagination, fashioning his own mermaid costume from a curtain and some ferns.
