Antwan Eady’s newest picture book, The Gathering Table (Knopf, 2025), illustrated by London Ladd, is a powerful recounting of a year of celebrations happening around one outdoor family table where food is shared alongside heaping helpings of love, hope, pride, and freedom. The book is packed full of affectionate and funny moments, resonating with readers on a universal [...]

Erin Soderberg Downing doesn’t just imagine her characters’ challenges; she often lives them! For her upcoming middle grade novel What Happened Then—which comes out September 2 from Scholastic—that meant writing the first ten chapters while staying on a remote, rugged island. For her adventure-packed novel Just Keep Walking (Scholastic, 2024), she undertook a hundred-mile [...]

Many of Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s books serve as compelling time machines, immersing young readers in riveting dramas as history unfolds across the pages of her stories. The Night War (Dial, 2024) is the latest of Bradley’s middle grade novels to be set against the backdrop of World War II, although in a different part of the world than her bestselling, Newbery Honor-winning [...]