Carrie Obry

Carrie Obry is stepping down from her position as executive director of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association, effective immediately. The board of directors has appointed operations manager Grace Hagen as interim executive director while a search is conducted for a permanent successor. During this period, Hagen will work closely with the board and senior leadership to ensure continuity in all organizational operations, while advancing the priorities and goals of MIBA.

"We are grateful to Carrie for 15 years of dedication to our organization," said board president Kristen Sandstrom, manager of Apostle Islands Booksellers, Bayfield, Wis. "We are committed to making this a smooth transition and will continue our mission of strengthening independent bookstores throughout our region."

The board said it will begin a search in the coming weeks to find a candidate "who is passionate about fostering a vital and supportive bookselling community, advocating for the essential value of independent bookstores, and possesses the skills and vision necessary to lead MIBA into its next chapter. MIBA is grateful to Carrie Obry for her contributions, dedication, and commitment to MIBA over the past 15 years and wishes her well in future endeavors."

Obry had been executive director since 2010, when she joined what was then called the Midwest Booksellers Association. Earlier she was an acquisitions editor for Llewellyn Worldwide and an editor at Sourcebooks and Aspen Publishers. She had also worked independently editing, writing and consulting.

Dr. Ellie Paris Social Book Store & Ice Cream Café will host a grand-opening celebration this Friday, November 22, at 278 Main Street in Brockton, Mass. The Enterprise reported that "ice cream, waffles, warm crepes, and cozy couches for curling up with a good book are all coming to downtown... with a mission to transform the city's literacy scene."

"What's better than ice cream and a good book?" said owner Ellie Paris-Miranda, who is introducing the concept to help educate the city and bring people together through books and socializing. "We're using ice cream as a tool to inspire people to read more, and ice cream makes everyone happy."

Paris-Miranda chose Brockton's Main Street for its vitality and location in the heart of the city: "This is my community. I'm Cape Verdean from Cape Verde, and Brockton was the first place that felt like home when I arrived here a decade ago. I want to create a business that people go to and feel inspired."

She described the new venture as "a warm and welcoming, charming empowering place with delicious, sweet treats menu and all types of books from local authors and popular ones around the globe."

Paris-Miranda added that the best part about her niche café is that it will give people access to knowledge, business advice, education, and amazing books, adding: "We believe every individual deserves access to valuable information, resources, and opportunities for advancement, prosperity, and growth, regardless of the community they were born in or live in." 

The bookshop/cafe's mission is to be "an innovative social impact bookstore and ice cream café on a mission to help communities facing persistent poverty and high unemployment, small businesses, and dreamers unlock their full potential and go even further.... At Dr. Ellie Paris, we believe every individual deserves access to valuable information, resources, and opportunities for advancement, prosperity, and growth, regardless of the community they were born in or live in."

Indies First, the national campaign of activities and events in support of independent bookstores, is returning this year on November 30, Small Business Saturday. This year's spokesperson is Trevor Noah, former host of The Daily Show and author of Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Since the creation of Indies First in 2013, spokespeople have included Amanda Gorman, Celeste Ng, Roxane Gay, Dan Rather, N.K. Jemisin, Jason Reynolds, and Cheryl Strayed.

In Atlanta, Ga., the Indies First/SBS festivities will begin on November 22 with the start of the Atlanta Indie Bookshop Crawl. Book lovers have until December 1 to visit participating stores in the metro Atlanta area and get their passports stamped. Those who collect five stamps by December 1 will receive 20% off a purchase at a participating bookstore of their choice. Those who collect a stamp from all 28 participating stores will be entered to win a grand prize raffle. Brave + Kind, based in Decatur, is organizing the Atlanta crawl.

Porter Square Books, Cambridge, Mass., is holding a grand-opening celebration for its new location on November 30. The festivities will include local authors serving as guest booksellers, a scavenger hunt, a raffle, and a holiday recommendation event in the evening. Customers will be able to earn raffle tickets for every $25 spent, or receive them in exchange for $10 donations to the Porter Square Books Foundation. Raffle prizes will include galleys, signed copies of Stephen King's The Institute, an appointment with a personal shopper, and a private shopping spree at the bookstore.

Indies First festivities at Charis Books & More in Decatur, Ga., will include a day of author events featuring Reem Faruqi (The House Without Lights), Breanna J. McDaniel (Go Forth and Tell: The Life of August Baker, Librarian and Master Storyteller), Muriel Leung (How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster), and Nibs Stroupe (She Made a Way: Mother and Me in a Deep South World). Charis will also be participating in the Atlanta Bookshop Crawl.

Once Upon a Time in Montrose, Calif., will offer special promotions, author visits, and prizes. All day long, customers will get to spin the store's wheel of prizes following any purchase, and will receive a free chocolate goodie with every purchase of $50 or more. Purchases of $150 or more, meanwhile, will come with a free gift. The day will open with an early-bird special 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., and conclude with a night-owl special from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Eight authors will also stop by for signings, including: Suzanne and Max Lang (The Grumpy Monkey Oh No! Christmas), Tom Phillips (The Curious League of Detectives and Thieves), Janie Emaus (Latkes for Santa Claus), Frans Vischer (A Very Fuddles Christmas), Katie Merten Horelick (Potty Like a Rockstar), Devin Elle Kurtz (The Bakery Dragon), and Jorge Cham (Oliver's Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot!).

In Brooklyn, N.Y., Greenlight Bookstore will hold its last event of the year on Indies First Day. Local author Jane Breskin Zalben will read her newest picture book Gingerbread Dreidels. To mark the occasion, there will be gingerbread treats available for all ages.

At Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Tex., plans for November 30 include Blind Date with a Book ARCs, afternoon drinks, holiday gift bundles, a display of the store's best books of 2024, a gratitude jar at the register, and more.

Shoppers who spend $100 or more at Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul, Minn, will receive a 40th-anniversary poster or anniversary sticker packet as long as supplies last. Red Balloon is currently celebrating its 40th birthday with a week of events that began on November 17 and will conclude November 23.

Sourcebooks has entered a joint venture partnership with Jeffrey Mason, creator of the Hear Your Story series of guided storytelling journals, to launch a new imprint, with the goal of expanding the reach and impact of Mason's books, which have sold more than two million copies worldwide.

Jeffrey Mason

Mason founded the Hear Your Story series in 2018 as a response to his father's battle with Alzheimer's. His initial books--Mom, I Want to Hear Your Story and Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story--have since grown into a series of more than 25 titles.

"I am so honored to join Sourcebooks in launching the Hear Your Story imprint," Mason said. "What started as a personal goal to preserve my family's memories has grown beyond my wildest expectations. Seeing how our guided journals have helped countless families strengthen connections and discover new understandings with each other has been profoundly humbling."

The Hear Your Story imprint will debut with a collection of four guided journals--Mom, I Want to Hear Your Story; Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story; Grandmother, I Want to Hear Your Story; and Grandfather, I Want to Hear Your Story. Phase two of the rollout will introduce new editions tailored to Mother's Day, Father's Day, and other special occasions, starting in 2025.

Each journal in the series offers some 200 curated prompts, creating a space for loved ones to share their memories and life lessons. With rights secured for world translation and audio, the books are designed to be passed down as treasured family heirlooms.

"This incredible partnership represents everything we care deeply about--authentic connection, innovation and a commitment to changing lives through books," said Dominique Raccah, publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks. "Jeffrey's extraordinary work has already touched so many hearts, and we're excited to help him reach millions more. Together, we are building a legacy for generations to come."

Ariel Curry, senior editor for nonfiction at Sourcebooks, said, "The tremendous popularity of the Hear Your Story books is evidence that people value deep connections with their loved ones. We're thrilled to be able to bring that opportunity to more families around the world."

"Sourcebooks isn't just a partner, they're family," added Mason. "Their commitment to bringing people together through books mirrors our own belief that everyone's story deserves to be cherished. The future holds endless possibilities for creating connection, one story at a time."

Arthur Frommer, "who expanded the horizons of postwar Americans and virtually invented the low-budget travel industry with his seminal guidebook, Europe on 5 Dollars a Day: A Guide to Inexpensive Travel, which introduced millions to an experience once considered the exclusive domain of the wealthy," died November 18, the New York Times reported. He was 95.

First published in 1957, Europe on 5 Dollars a Day sold millions of copies and was updated until 2007, when its name was Europe from $95 a Day. Frommer built on the book's success by offering other guidebooks, package tours, hotel deals, and more.

"His earnest prose, alternately lyrical and artless but always compulsively informative, conveyed a near-missionary zeal for travel and elevated Frommer's from the how-to genre to the kind of book that could change a person's worldview," the Times wrote.

"This is a book," he wrote, "for American tourists who a) own no oil wells in Texas, b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan, c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation."

Frommer considered budget travelers better U.S. ambassadors to Europeans and likely learned more and had a more enjoyable time than affluent travelers. He had a few simple rules:

"Never travel first class. (If going by boat, consider freighters.) Pack lightly enough to be free from porters, taxi drivers and bellhops. Stay in pensions; take the room without the bath. Eat in restaurants patronized by locals. Try to engage locals in conversation. Study maps. Take public transportation. Buy a Eurail pass."

By 1977, when he sold his publishing operations to Simon & Schuster, he offered budget guides to New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Mexico, the Caribbean, Hawaii, Japan and 300 other destinations. (Today the Frommer enterprise says it has sold more than 75 million books and has 130 active titles, available in print and in e-books, the Times noted.)

After the sale, Frommer remained chairman and president of Arthur Frommer International Inc., which included a large wholesale tour operation and eventually the online consumer travel site frommers.com. John Wiley & Sons acquired the company in 2001 and sold it to Google in 2012. 

In 2013, eight months after it was sold, Frommer bought the Frommer brand name back from Google and announced plans to publish a new series of guidebooks--both digitally and on paper--under a new company name, FrommerMedia, which continues to operate.

Roger Dow, the former CEO of the United States Travel Association, said in an interview that "before him, the average American just did not go to Europe, or much of anywhere else overseas. This guy single-handedly opened up that prospect to a huge new population."

BookTowne, Manasquan, N.J., held its third annual Read-a-Thon benefit November 16-17. Booksellers took turns reading in the store's window to raise funds for the The Ocean Is Female, a nonprofit that supports and empowers women survivors of abuse and/or domestic violence. The event kicked off on Saturday with visits from local celebs and an open house from 7 to 8 p.m., when the first reader took their place in the window. Booksellers continued to read in shifts all night long (air mattresses provided!) until 7 the next morning. Pictured: (l.-r.) Leigh Mallin, Rick Buttafogo, Stacey Montalto, Susan Kuper, and owner Peter Albertelli.

Beginning this Friday, November 22, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City will present Franz Kafka, an exhibition coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the author's death. Running until April 13, 2025, and presented in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, the exhibition will celebrate Kafka's life, literary works, and influence, and include holdings from the Bodleian Libraries that have never appeared before in the U.S. The exhibit focuses on Kafka's connection to the U.S. and will include, among other things, the manuscripts of Kafka's novels Amerika and The Castle, diaries, drawings, and family photographs.

A variety of special programs will run during the course of the exhibition, including panel discussions, lectures, gallery tours, and a concert featuring pianist Jenny Lin performing Philip Glass's Metamorphosis, actor Saori Tsukada reading passages from Kafka's work, and Lindsay Rosenberg performing the premiere of Glass's new works for solo bass.

"The Morgan was delighted at the opportunity to celebrate our centennial in conjunction with the Bodleian and to honor Franz Kafka and his enduring impact on literature," said Colin B. Bailey, the Katharine J. Rayner Director at the Morgan Library. "We are honored to be the sole American venue for this landmark literary exhibition."

Sal Robinson, the Morgan's Lucy Ricciardi Assistant Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, said, "This exhibition, the first of its kind on Franz Kafka in the United States, will not only provide a unique opportunity to celebrate Kafka's work and learn about his life, but will also engage with rarely emphasized aspects of both, from women like Ottla Kafka and Milena Jesenská, who played key roles in his life, to the very much ongoing afterlife of his works as they are translated into other languages and media."

"We capped off a wild week of events with a pretty magical night last night. We have officially hosted our first wedding here," Cavalier House Books, Denham Springs, La., posted on Instagram. "We were so honored when the Haymans asked if they could share their vows in our space. Y'all they have been visiting the bookshop on date nights for years; I don't know if my heart can handle the cuteness! Thank y'all for letting us be a part of your special day!! Congratulations and all of our best wishes to the Haymans!"

The latest Open Book with David Steinberger podcast is called "the Jar" and features literary agent Simon Lipskar. He talks about his journey at Authors House, the rise of Amazon, the role of the internet in the success of books, and the potential impact of AI on publishing. The podcast is available here.

Justin Alvarez has joined Ingram Content Group as manager of consumer marketing sales. He was most recently at Literary Hub and has more than 15 years of experience in publishing and marketing, with extensive experience in digital media strategies for a range of publications and global corporations, including the Paris Review, the London Review of Books, Lucky Peach, IBM, and Campari.

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Addie Gilligan is joining Scribner as a publicist on December 2. Previously, she was an associate publicist for Fortier Public Relations.

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Jaleel White, author of Growing Up Urkel (Simon & Schuster, $28.99, 9781668068892).
 
The View: Christian Siriano, author of Christian Siriano: The New Red Carpet (Rizzoli, $55, 9780847859863).
 
The Talk: Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, authors of Ghosts of Panama: A Strongman Out of Control, A Murdered Marine, and the Special Agents Caught in the Middle of an Invasion (Harper Select, $29.99, 9781400248605).
 
Drew Barrymore Show: Jessica Seinfeld, co-author of Not Too Sweet: 100 Dessert Recipes for Those Who Want More with Just a Little Less (Gallery Books, $32.50, 9781668015360).

Veteran screenwriter Tiffany Paulsen will adapt In a Holidaze, based on the 2020 holiday rom-com novel by Christina Lauren, the pen name for longtime writing partners Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, Deadline reported. The project, which has been billed as "Love Actually meets Groundhog Day," is in early development at Netflix.

Paulsen recently made her film directorial debut with Winter Spring Summer or Fall, which starred Jenna Ortega and world premiered at this year's Tribeca Festival. She is currently adapting Lynne Painter's romance Mr. Wrong Number, with an eye to direct.

Alloy Entertainment's president and CCO Leslie Morgenstein will produce In a Holidaze alongside the company's executive v-p, film, Elysa Koplovitz Dutton.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (published in the U.S. by Knopf) has won the £50,000 (about $63,300) 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He thus becomes the first author to "win the double" of the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He won the Booker in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Organizers wrote, "Beginning at a love hotel by Japan's Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. Exploring the value of life, Flanagan tackles far-ranging seemingly disparate personal and historical topics, from H.G. Wells' affair with Rebecca West, to the atomic bomb and his own near-death experience, expertly documenting life's chain reaction: from past to present to future."

Chair of judges Isabel Hilton added: "Question 7 is an astonishingly accomplished meditation on memory, history, trauma, love and death--and an intricately woven exploration of the chains of consequence that frame a life.

"In a year rich in remarkable books, Richard Flanagan's Question 7 spoke to the judges for its outstanding literary qualities and its profound humanity. This compelling memoir ranges from intimate human relations to an unflinching examination of the horrors of the 20th century, reflecting on unanswerable questions that we must keep asking."

In a video aired at the award presentation last night in London, Flanagan, who is Australian, said he would decline to accept the award money until Baillie Gifford, a fund manager, "shares a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuel extraction and increase investments in renewables," the Guardian wrote. He added that he would welcome a chance to speak with the company's board to "describe how fossil fuels are destroying our country" and said his words shouldn't be seen as a criticism of Baillie Gifford.

The Guardian noted that Baillie Gifford, which has sponsored the prize since 2016, "has come under fire in recent years because of its investments in fossil fuels and companies linked to Israel. Earlier this year, literary festival boycotts organised by campaign group Fossil Free Books led to the termination of partnerships between Baillie Gifford and nine festivals... Speaking at the ceremony, Baillie Gifford's partner Peter Singlehurst said that with the support of the literary community 'we would dearly love to continue sponsoring this magnificent prize.' "

photo: Carina Fushimi

Mike Fu is a writer, translator, and editor living in Japan. He has studied in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Suzhou, and Tokyo. His Chinese-English translation of Stories of the Sahara by the late Taiwanese cultural icon Sanmao was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Paris Review and was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose. He is a cofounder and former translation editor of the Shanghai Literary Review, and recently completed his Ph.D. in cultural studies at Waseda University. His debut novel is Masquerade (Tin House, October 29, 2024), a coming-of-age mystery--stylistically daring, with jigsaw plotting, lush sensuality, and a tender emotional core.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

An existential mystery involving a masked ball in Shanghai, a mushroom trip on Cape Cod, experimental theater, Brooklyn dinner parties, and ghosts of all kinds.

On your nightstand now:

I just finished Yukio Mishima's The Temple of Dawn, translated by E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle. This is the third book in the Sea of Fertility tetralogy that Mishima wrote before he attempted to overthrow the Japanese government and, failing to do so, committed seppuku. Impossible to sum up, but it's a fascinating series that balances esoteric philosophical musings with beautifully morbid prose and social caricatures. The last 30 pages or so of Temple of Dawn really did a number on me. I'm a bit apprehensive to start the last book.

Favorite book when you were a child:

In elementary school, I was obsessed with The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien for the expansiveness of its world, and the mythologies, languages, and customs of its peoples. By middle school, I was hooked on the gothic horror mysteries of John Bellairs, who remains an underappreciated author in my opinion. His books feature several recurring young male protagonists, each of whom has to confront unspeakable terrors and occult phenomena in small-town, midcentury America--with a ragtag group of misfit friends young and old, naturally.

Your top five authors:

James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami, Donald Richie. I discovered their work almost by happenstance, and at very different times in my life. Simply put, their stories have touched me deeply, inspiring me to see the world anew and to write, goddamnit.

Books you've faked reading:

Despite my love of Tolkien, there were huge swaths of The Lord of the Rings that I "speed read" in my excitement to get through them all as a preteen. In my first semester of undergrad, we were assigned Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway in conjunction with a screening of The Hours for a cinema class, and my feckless 17-year-old self couldn't get around to it. There were some other academic misses along the way, too, mostly during my first tour of grad school, when dense tomes of continental philosophy and literary theory (I won't name names) had me quaking in my boots and tongue-tied in the seminar room.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith. Kupersmith crafts a wry and unsettling narrative of contemporary Saigon by casting a shiftless Vietnamese American woman in the familiar archetype of an English teacher abroad. But then she dives into layers of colonial history through a substantial cast of characters, a thrillingly twisty plot, and scenes of fantastic grotesquerie. So skillfully executed and memorable, with a damn near perfect ending.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Mr. Ma and Son by Lao She, translated by William Dolby, a novel about a Chinese family running an antique shop in pre-World War II London. Admittedly, I still haven't gotten around to cracking it open, but the Penguin Modern Classics cover and my interest in the author, whom I haven't read much of, justified the purchase. Picked it up at the annual summer sale of Kinokuniya Shinjuku, the biggest foreign-language bookstore in Tokyo (and assumedly Japan, by extension).

Book you hid from your parents:

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. I remember checking out this first book, and then the rest of the series in quick succession, from the Cleveland Public Library as a 16-year-old and feeling grateful for its inconspicuous title and cover. These adventures of an unabashedly queer and freewheeling San Francisco community in the 1970s taught me about California before I ever set foot there.

Book that changed your life:

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. It was the perfect read for a brutal New York winter in my mid-20s, when I was still mustering up the wherewithal to get serious about writing. Auster's seminal triptych showed me how fiction could be at once playfully reflexive and dead serious, taking weirder and weirder turns while poking at the boundary between the writer and the story itself.

Favorite line from a book:

Oh, I have so many! There's a passage from Murakami's Underground--a nonfiction book about the cult-perpetrated sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995--that has lodged itself in my mind for years. It succinctly captures a motivating factor for my writing:

"Now a narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are the whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. 'Storyteller' and at the same time 'character.' It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world." (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)

Five books you'll never part with:

Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang, translated by Karen Kingsbury--a beautiful collection of stories from a tumultuous era in modern Chinese history.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston--signed by the author at a 40th-anniversary event held in Brooklyn.

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian, translated by Mabel Lee--I read more than half the book when I was 20 or so and never made it to the finish line, but it's survived quite a few purges, and I've lugged it from Los Angeles to New York to Tokyo. Someday I'll have the maturity to return to it again.

A secondhand copy of A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by John Nathan--one of the most gripping novels I've ever read, recommended by a creative writing professor long ago.

Another Country by James Baldwin--a wistful, lovely, and delightfully unpredictable novel of race, class, and sexuality set in 1950s New York and France.

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

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa. What a wild ride. I love how masterfully he delineates the contours of this world and unspools the characters' fates over the course of generations. And that ending!

Three-time Caldecott Honor winner Mo Willems (Pigeon series) and National Book Award winner and Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat (A First Time for Everything) show their hands (literally) in their cleverly enlightening, utterly hilarious debut picture book collaboration, Lefty: A Story That Is Not All Right. Photographs of hands jauntily topped with trendy, expressive glasses--Santat stays left, Willems keeps right--take to an ancient, columned stage to offer significant talking points, both historical and contemporary. In between, Santat handily displays wonderfully distinct illustrative styles--medieval, Greco-Roman, '60s advertising, panel comics--across eye-popping double-page spreads.

Willems's narrative opens in the past, with Lefty asking Righty, "Did you know... there was a time when people could get into trouble... really really BIG trouble... FOR BEING LEFT-HANDED?" Righty's understandable shock ("HUBBA WHAAAA!?!?") turns his eyewear askew as Lefty explains "It's true!" In an illustration reminiscent of a woodblock carving, three right hands with angrily intolerant villagers for fingers chase off an understandably frightened left-hand dragon. "You might be called 'sinister.' You might be told you were born 'WRONG.' " That sort of potentially fatal persecution forced people to hide themselves for fear "they would be left out."

Thankfully, anti-lefty prejudices eventually dissipated and handedness just is: naturally reaching for a pencil or picking up scissors shows if you're left- or right-handed, while those lucky to use both hands equally are ambidextrous. Many lefties are admired and recognized, like iconic artist Frida Kahlo; of course, right-handed Abraham Lincoln is also rather memorable, too. Like everyone else, left-handed people may also not be famous, may be "really, really nice," or perhaps may need to "work on being nicer." Whatever your handedness, "left or right, it's ALL alright."

Willems and Santat put on an undoubtedly smash-hit performance, with even a few Easter egg reminders of past bookish successes (younger devoted groupies will certainly not miss spotting the Pigeon). The creators' heartening underlying message never gets old: be yourself. "If you're hiding who you are, you feel rotten." Throughout the author and artist's playful teamwork, their dynamic pages are encouragingly representative of plenty of diversity, with the supporting cast's hands drawn in various hues. This dynamic duo's gleeful energy will prove unavoidably, invitingly infectious. Thumbs up, palms up, or hands together for a lively round of well-deserved applause. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: Powerhouses Mo Willems and Dan Santat cleverly use their own hands to provide energetic, entertaining, enlightening, empowering encouragement to children to never hide their true selves.