Publisher Weekly's Best Books of 2007 for Children

Categories: Award Winners , Children's Books

Publisher’s Weekly has selected it’s choices for the Best Books of the Year 2007. The Children’s titles are wayyyyyy down at the bottom of the list. The categories are Children’s Picture Books, Children’s Fiction (which includes titles for teens), and Children’s Nonfiction.

I’ve listed their Children’s Picture Book and Children’s Nonfiction choices below and included a brief plot summary for each.

Children's Picture Books

At Night by Jonathan Bean is a beautifully illustrated, rhyming story about a girl's difficulty falling asleep in her urban house.

In Jon Agee's Nothing, shoppers vie to buy the latest "nothing" in this wry spin on The Emperor's New Clothes.

Mother Goose Numbers on the Loose by Leo and Diane Dillon is easily the best number oriented concept book of 2007. Personified numerals join hands with elaborately costumed characters in this inventive, visually dazzling interpretation of favorite nursery rhymes that feature numbers.

Emily Gravett does it again in Orange Pear Apple Bear. This is quite simply, a beautifully illustrated, simple story for young readers.

Join fairy-tale characters on a journey from one to ten and back again in 1 2 3: A Child's First Counting Book by Alison Jay.  

Richard Michelson's Tuttle's Red Barn: The Story of America's Oldest Family Farm follows twelve generations of a New Hampshire farm family in this heartwarming look at American history.

Good books for emergent readers are hard to find, but Laura Vaccaro Seeger does an outstanding job in Dog and Bear: Two Friends, Three Stories. A dachshund and a teddy bear serve as protagonists in three simple stories so true that the conclusions seem inevitable even as they take readers by surprise.

The text and three-color art in The Apple Pie That Papa Baked by Lauren Thompson pays homage to classic children's books in the tradition of Virginia Lee Burton and Wanda Gág.

Mo Willems reprises the illustration style of Knuffle Bunny in Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity where the stuffed bunny becomes a surprise vehicle for a new friendship. 

Children's Nonfiction

Steven Jenkins is a nonfiction master and Living Color does not disappoint. Showcasing his trademark detailed cut-paper collages, this stunning primer on both animals and colors includes more than 60 creatures.

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis is a gripping account of the author’s own path to freedom in Cold War era Prague.