Our 2025 Best Children's and YA Books list features some of the most creative, spellbinding, or extraordinarily illustrated titles Shelf Awareness has reviewed this year. Young readers will find realistic stories about bellies and being bilingual, enchanting adventures through storms and art history, and a slightly spooky tale with utterly charming characters. Middle-grade readers are shown World War II and the very bottom of the ocean, two cli-fi novels, one fantastical and filled with pirates and another that is (scarily) possible but remarkably hopeful, and an underwater fantasy with a ghost protagonist. And our young adult picks feature thoroughly researched nonfiction, uncommon love stories, and an absolute blast of a babysitting adventure. Click here to read our reviews of the top kids' titles for 2025. (Shelf Awareness's Best Adult Books are here.) --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Picture Book
Cat Nap by Brian Lies (Greenwillow Books)
Everybelly by Thao Lam (Groundwood Books)
The Interpreter by Olivia Abtahi, illus. by Monica Arnaldo (Kokila)
Island Storm by Brian Floca, illus. by Sydney Smith (Neal Porter Books)
The Slightly Spooky Tale of Fox and Mole by Cecilia Heikkilä, translated by Polly Lawson (Floris Books)

Middle Grade
Graciela in the Abyss by Meg Medina, illus. by Elena Balbusso (Candlewick)
Higher Ground by Tull Suwannakit (Crocodile Books)
I'm a Dumbo Octopus: A Graphic Guide to Cephalopods by Anne Lambelet (Graphic Universe/Lerner)
Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson (Quill Tree Books)
The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri (Levine Querido)

Young Adult
The Assassin's Guide to Babysitting by Natalie C. Parker (Candlewick)
The Best of All Worlds by Kenneth Oppel (Scholastic Press)
The Corruption of Hollis Brown by K. Ancrum (HarperCollins)
Hick: The Trailblazing Journalist Who Captured Eleanor Roosevelt's Heart by Sarah Miller (Random House Studio)
The Leaving Room by Amber McBride (Feiwel & Friends)
White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War, Then Rewrote the History by Ann Bausum (Roaring Brook Press)

Love Story Book Co. will host its grand opening celebration, with prizes, raffles, and giveaways, this weekend in Mahan Square Shopping Center at 1350 Mahan Dr., Ste. B2, Tallahassee, Fla. The Tallahassee Democrat reported that owner Sarah Babchuck was inspired to open the store by her lifelong passion for reading and the romance genre.

"I think the world just needs more love, love stories and all of that," she said. "It's a really beautiful thing to kind of put out there and have a space where you just focus on love, happiness and happy endings.... I'm just really hoping a lot of people come. I just want people to have fun at the store and find books and things that they love. I want it to be a fun place for people to come."

While the store has been in the works for the last six to eight months, the vision behind it had been embedded in Babchuck's mind for years: "I've loved reading my whole life. I've always been that person who has a book with them everywhere. I always had my book and was trying to read with every spare second I had, romance especially. Who doesn't love a love story, a happy ending, a little love, a little spice?"

The bookstore is decorated in bright pink shades and hand-painted murals of hearts and rings on the wall. In addition to books, it offers reading-related accessories like bookmarks and pens, as well as candles, stickers, and T-shirts. She also hopes to host book clubs, events, and collaborations with other businesses.

"I think having another space for romance, particularly, is really empowering," Babchuck added. "That was kind of my biggest inspiration, taking something I'm really passionate about and creating a space for it."

I'll Meet You There Bookstore and Coffee Shop has opened in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Homegrown Iowan reported.

Located at 62 16th Ave. SW in the city's Czech Village neighborhood, I'll Meet You There opened on Monday with a starting inventory of around 1,200 titles. Books are available for all ages, and the store features comfortable seating and a children's corner. The coffee shop side of the business is not yet open, but should be up and running within the next week or two. It will serve tea, coffee, energy drinks, and assorted pastries.

Store owners and sisters Lindsay McGrath and Jaymie McGrath named the bookstore in honor of their mother, Mary Kay McGrath, who died in 2024. She was an entrepreneur and property owner who helped revitalize Czech Village; in 2018 she bought eight flood-damaged buildings in the neighborhood and turned them into a candy store, ice cream shop, cafe, and other businesses. "I'll meet you there" was a phrase she often said.

"From what I'm told, Mary Kay had always wanted to see a bookstore down here," store manager Lucy Steele told Homegrown Iowan. "They felt the time was right to honor her and do that."

Following its debut as an online and mobile bookstore in Portland, Ore., Endless Wonders has opened a pop-up location inside a local bakery, Montavilla News reported.

Endless Wonders is an all-ages bookstore that focuses on titles by and about people from historically underrepresented communities. Its pop-up space debuted at Hungry Heart Bakery, at 414 SE 80th Ave. in Portland's Montavilla neighborhood, on November 13.

Zo Nicole and Mags Burke, owners of Endless Wonders, met Jax Hart, owner of Hungry Heart, at a Pride pop-up event over the summer. After doing the "street fair circuit" and deciding that Montavilla was the neighborhood they wanted to focus on, Burke told Montavilla News, she and Nicole did a three-day pop-up in Hungry Heart before discussing longer-term options with Hart.

The bookstore pop-up has extended the bakery's opening hours. In the morning, Nicole explained, the "Hungry Hearts staff will be able to ring people up for their bookstore purchases" along with coffee, pastries, and whatever else they might order. Previously, the bakery would close in the early afternoon, but now Nicole comes in around noon to run the bookstore until the early evening and extend the coffee and pastry service.

Burke and Nicole hope to open a dedicated bricks-and-mortar space of their own eventually.

The Booksellers Association of the U.K. and Ireland will partner with Bookshop.org for the Indie Book of the Month promotion for 2026, to coincide with the National Year of Reading, the Bookseller reported. Each Book of the Month will be supported by a "unified promotional strategy," using the BA's digital and in-store materials alongside Bookshop.org's online platform. A key element of the partnership will be the integration of Bookshop.org's new e-book service. 

A statement from the BA and Bookshop.org noted that the combined campaign will "increase the impact of each selected book and deliver tangible value for participating bookshops. It will help more readers discover exceptional titles while keeping bookshops central to the national promotion of reading for pleasure."

Emma Bradshaw, head of marketing and communications at the BA, said: "Aligning our Book of the Month campaigns with Bookshop.org for the entire National Year of Reading will give bookshops more visibility, support reader discovery and spotlight exceptional books--all within the context of bookshops being at the epicenter of expert curation, community value and the promotion of reading for pleasure." 

Jasper Sutcliffe, head of business development at Bookshop.org, added: "Bookshop.org exists to help independent bookshops thrive, both on the high street and online. This united, year-long approach with the Booksellers Association--alongside the addition of our new e-book service--will bring even more readers to great books via the bookshop ecosystem we're proud to support as a cornerstone of not just the book trade, but the wider reading community."

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German booksellers are quietly optimistic going into the holiday season, which normally accounts for up to a quarter of their annual turnover, the Bookseller reported. A survey published at the end of November by the general retail trade association HDE underlined this optimism, finding that despite retailers in general being pessimistic about December sales, booksellers were an exception.  

According to book trade newsletter Langendorfs Dienst, sales were down an estimated 7.1% in the first week of December and down 4.3% on the respective Saturday; the second week was also down (by 3.3%), though Saturday sales gained 2.9%.

Booksellers are now hoping for strong sales during the remaining two weeks before they close for Christmas, the Bookseller noted, adding that with "the consensus that Germans leave their Christmas shopping, and especially books, later every year, many booksellers therefore do not seem unduly worried yet."

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The European & International Booksellers Federation has launched the recruitment process for its next director, following the departure of Julie Belgrado after a decade in the position. 

EIBF said it is "seeking an experienced, forward-looking director to lead our Brussels secretariat and represent booksellers at the highest levels of EU and international policymaking. This is a unique opportunity to guide a small but highly active organization with a strong mission and an engaged global community." Check out the qualifications here.

Poet, musician, and writer Charles Coe, whose poems "told vast stories," has died. He was 73. The Boston Globe reported that, with an economy of words, Coe "wrote poems that told vast stories, and he filled prose essays with passages that could enliven any verse. An accomplished musician and chef as well, he wrote and performed songs and prepared meals that were a chorus of tastes. Surprising no one, he also composed social media posts that read like miniature poems and essays." 

Charles Coe

"The guy was on fire,'' said Roberto Mighty, a filmmaker, educator, and musician who made a documentary, Charles Coe: Man of Letters, about him. "He did not expect to die. He was incredibly ambitious, and he was working very hard, which is something I admired greatly.''

Coe published poetry collections, fiction, and essays. He taught writing at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., and in Dingle, Ireland, for Bay Path University. He also served as a City of Boston artist-in-residence and as a Boston Public Library Literary Light. In addition, he had co-chaired the Boston chapter of the National Writers Union and been a visiting poet in area schools. 

His poems "look like lyrics on the page, but they are little stories. He was a storyteller,'' said poet Richard Hoffman, adding that when writing poems, he "would boil it down to keep it simple."

Coe "was kind of plainspoken and used language that everyone can relate to, to create something really extraordinary--that's a gift,'' said Ann Hood, a novelist and founding director of the Newport MFA in creative writing at Salve Regina. In person, he was "all about leading with your heart. I don't think I've known anyone who was, at the same time, nobody's fool but so openhearted that he just observed everything from the point of view of caring about people.''

In 2013, he published the poetry collection All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents. "The title is about me making peace with many of the feelings adult children have when they look back on their lives,'' he said in a 2013 Globe interview. "Dad died eight years ago, then mom, and my one sister, three years older, after that. So, there's no one I can sit around my kitchen table with and say, 'Hey, do you remember when?' ''

Coe published five volumes of poetry and a novella. "His 2013 collection about grief, sense of place and mortality was titled Memento Mori, loosely translated from Latin as 'remember that you must die.' He was working on a family memoir inspired by his sister’s death after a protracted battle with liver cancer, and had several screenplays in progress," Cambridge Day noted.

Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, Mass., posted on social media: "We mourn the loss of poet, musician, and storyteller Charles Coe, a gentle giant of the Boston literary community. Kind, clever, ever-curious, he was an ardent advocate of the arts and a beloved member of the Boston poetry scene and beyond.... Charles's work is a powerful talisman to carry with us through grief, through difficulty, and through change. He was a writer who reminded us not only of the essential power of resistance but also of small joys, the precious things in life that make this world and the people in it worth loving and fighting for." 

"No stranger to profound loss and the deaths of those he loved," Coe "captured the experience of walking along mourning's unstable path in his poem 'The Geology of Grief,' " the Globe noted. The poem included the lines:

We climb from the wreckage,
toss our useless maps aside and explore
the new landscape on feet forevermore
denied the illusion of solid ground.

Brenda Lea McConnell, co-owner of Kona Stories Bookstore in Kailua Kona, Haw., checked in to share "what we are doing out here in Hawaii to support our community and celebrate the holiday season with our customers." The bookshop "is closing out the year with a pair of festive Saturday events designed to deepen community connections, boost foot traffic, and highlight the value of shopping local during the holiday season."

For the final two Saturdays before Christmas, Kona Stories is hosting a series of in-store experiences "aimed at creating a festive atmosphere and encouraging repeat visits." Each Saturday features a story time reading of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, followed by free photos with the Grinch--a draw for families and a way to create memorable holiday moments directly inside the bookstore.

To further support holiday shoppers, the store has set up a free DIY gift-wrapping station. McConnell adds a personal touch by serving a complimentary glass of homemade "holiday cheer," helping create a warm, welcoming environment during one of the busiest shopping periods of the year.

"As in many small communities, Kona Stories plays a vital role in promoting the benefits of shopping locally," McConnell noted. "The bookstore emphasizes the economic and cultural importance of independent retail on Hawai'i Island, where supply chain challenges and limited brick-and-mortar options make community loyalty especially impactful. The store's holiday programming aligns with its year-round goal: to connect readers with knowledgeable booksellers who can help pair customers with meaningful, high-quality book gifts.

"By offering family-friendly events, free services, and a personalized shopping experience, Kona Stories demonstrates how indie bookstores can innovate within their unique environments--whether on a remote island or in the center of a major city. As bookstores everywhere experiment with ways to build community and differentiate themselves during the holiday rush, Kona Stories offers a thoughtful model of how local engagement, curated inventory, and festive programming can work together to create memorable experiences that keep customers coming back."

Warwick's Bookstore in La Jolla, Calif., shared a photo from its annual Santa Paws event, noting that bookseller and local author coordinator James Jensen starts growing his beard out in July every year in preparation. 

"New books, hot cocoa, great gifts." That was the holiday season promise on the sidewalk chalkboard in front of Emry's Bookshop, Hilton Head Island, S.C., which noted: "emry's bookshop is great place to find unique christmas gifts!"

"Wilbur is NOT helping me with this book art order, no matter how he thinks he is," Magnolia & Main Books in Ridgeway, Va., posted on Facebook.

Erika Tucker has joined Sourcebooks as associate director, international sales.

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Marisa Kashino, author of Best Offer Wins: A Novel (Celadon, $27.99, 9781250400543).

Johnny Depp will produce the first English-language film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel The Master and Margarita. Deadline reported that Depp shared the news in an appearance to promote the project at Saudia Arabia's Red Sea Film Festival, though "he is not currently attached to star. No word yet on who wrote the script, and a director has not yet been attached."

Depp will produce with Stephen Deuters and Stephen Malit under his IN.2 Film banner, alongside Svetlana Dali, Grace Loh, Natalia Rogal, and Robert MacLean for Tribune Pictures. Executive producers include the late Michael Lang, Nevin Shalit, Andrew Fourman World Visions' Konstantin Elkin, and Tribune Pictures' Michael Paletta. The project reunites Depp with Dali, who exec produced Jeanne du Barry and Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness.

The longlist has been released for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards and can be seen here. The four category winners will be named on January 28 in New York City.

"Taken together, these 40 books offer a kind of panoramic view of the world we're building. You see the pressures, the possibilities, and the ideas that will meaningfully shape the years ahead," managing director Sally Haldorson wrote. "And running through all of them is a shared belief: the future is not something hurtling toward us, but something we actively influence. They offer practical ways to make better ethical, strategic, and humane decisions--and to take the kind of purposeful action that supports stronger organizations, healthier communities, and a more hopeful future."

photo: Clare Worsley

Davey Davis is a writer and author living in Brooklyn, N.Y. Davis is the author of X and the earthquake room. They write a weekly newsletter about art, culture, sexuality, and people named David. Their third novel, Casanova 20: Or, Hot World (Catapult, December 2, 2025), is about art, desire, and mortality, following a young man isolated by his extraordinary beauty and his strange friendship with an older painter.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

I set out to write about transness without trans characters. I ended up with twink death and gay guy angst, but heterosexual. Go figure.

On your nightstand now:

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes, because I adored the film and can never get enough of my moody California noirs. Unsex Me Here by Aurora Mattia, who has finally turned her ravishing technique loose on the prose collection. Gender Without Identity by Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou, because it was partially through the latter's work on trauma and desire that I became something of a psychoanalysis groupie.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Besides Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis were the first books to take me captive. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy are pure adventure, but The Last Battle was my favorite. Its rendering of Christian salvation felt more real and beautiful to me than anything the Bible had to say on the subject.

Your top five authors:

Vladimir Nabokov and Cormac McCarthy are a tie, for obvious reasons. Gayl Jones completely reinvents the novel form with every book she writes. John Berger was a tremendous multidisciplinary artist that I look up to politically as well as in terms of craft. More recent but no less indispensable obsessions are the recently departed Gary Indiana--a "faggot forefather," as Brandon Sanchez wrote on his passing--and Jean Giono, France's transcendent answer to William Faulkner.

Book you've faked reading:

I've recently become fascinated by the history of quantum physics, but even pop-sci books on the subject are too difficult for me to really wrap my head around. I think I got halfway through Adam Becker's What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics and halfway through Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss--so with some faker arithmetic, that adds up to one whole book, right? Don't ask me to explain anything because I can't.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Gretchen Felker-Martin's Cuckoo, a horror novel set in an American conversion camp for queer kids. It's not for the faint of heart--it made me cry several times, plus it's fucking scary--but I think everyone should read it.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I don't really think I operate that way, but Huw Lemmey's RED TORY: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell has this bizarrely lovely design, complete with a decorative dust jacket that's mocked up to look like a tabloid that perfectly teases the heart-racing, nightmarish chaos lurking inside.

Book you hid from your parents:

I can't praise my parents for much except their refusal to censor what I read. They really didn't give a shit as long as I was reading, although I did get in trouble for parroting rude lines from John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

Book that changed your life:

Lolita by Nabokov. I'm not special!

Favorite line from a book:

Who can choose? But I do find myself returning to Berger's A Painter of Our Time--which for me is a sort of user manual for my instrument--sometimes for this line alone: "I am a painter and not a writer or a politician or a lover because I recognize a climax in the way two hanging cherries touch one another or in the structural difference between a horse's leg and a man's leg. Who can understand that?"

Five books you'll never part with:

I'm lucky to have in my possession a copy of Red Jordan Arobateau's first published novel, Lucy & Mickey, a butch trip through life before Stonewall. I also have a copy of Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist from the ReSearch People Series, which I found at Autoerotica in San Francisco last year. Patrick Califia's Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, Leslie Feinberg's Trans Liberation: beyond pink or blue, John Rechy's The Sexual Outlaw. As a transsexual from California, the work of these essential (and undersung) artists and writers is deeply personal for me. Public sex is foundational to my culture and my history, things that as a young gay person I was told I couldn't possibly have. But I did, in no small part because of the courage and conviction of these very writers.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Most of my Hollywood biographies and profiles--Roy Newquist's Conversations with Joan Crawford, Peter Biskind's My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, Margaret Barton-Fumo's Paul Verhoeven: Interviews--fall into this category. I love dishy movie star trivia but, like a goldfish, I can't retain most of it, so every time I crack open one of these books, it really does feel like the first time.

Julia Cooke's sharp, insightful third book, Starry and Restless, follows the lives, careers, and connections of Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, and Emily "Mickey" Hahn--three pioneering reporters and writers whose work changed journalism and took readers to places few other writers dared go. Cooke (Come Fly the World) draws on each woman's correspondence, plus interviews and their extensive bodies of published work, to paint a nuanced portrait of three women who refused to sit quietly on the society pages, but who also struggled to balance professional and personal success.

Cooke explores her subjects' backgrounds, detailing the early circumstances that inspired in each woman a hunger for storytelling, travel, and independence. In alternating chapters, she takes readers through the careers they built around (and sometimes against) political events and headwinds. This includes accounts of Gellhorn's wartime reporting in Europe and East Asia, West's journeys to Yugoslavia in the 1930s, and Hahn's years in 1930s Nationalist China and then in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong.

Quoting from her subjects' own letters and published pieces, Cooke explores their full range of emotions, including fear, love, elation, loneliness, and occasional insecurity about their work. But she also takes them seriously as practitioners of their craft, praising Gellhorn's daring journeys to various front lines during World War II; West's prolific, genre-crossing work on travel, politics, and family life; and Hahn's persistence in building relationships in Shanghai (which led to her writing a biography of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her sisters).

All three women pursued love and motherhood alongside their careers, though they shared a determination not to let traditional domestic stereotypes keep them from their work. Cooke relates the joy and the complications they found in marriage, including Gellhorn's tumultuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway, West's uneasy relationship to her role as chatelaine of a country estate near London, and Hahn's relationship with Chinese writer and publisher Shao Xunmei.

Making one's way as a female writer has always carried with it certain challenges, and Cooke is honest about those difficulties and her subjects' dogged attempts to overcome them. She also highlights how Gellhorn, West, and Hahn supported one another, through lunches and letters and professional encouragement. Starry and Restless emphasizes the ways these three women helped shape the popular understanding of major events and conflicts in the mid-20th century--and the ways their lives and work helped set a new standard for female journalists who craved adventure, success, and a good story. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Shelf Talker: Julia Cooke's sharp, insightful third book is a nuanced account of three pioneering female journalists and the ways their work helped shape the world.