Two-time Caldecott Medal winner Chris Raschka captures the sound, passion, innovation, and love of the arts that the renowned jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams shared with the world. Mary’s Idea is a stunning and transporting picture book about music and the creative process, for readers of Trombone Shorty and Chris Raschka’s acclaimed books about musicians, including Charlie Parker Played Be Bop and Mysterious Thelonious.

At the age of three, Mary Lou Williams taught herself how to play the piano. At the age of fifteen, she was considered a professional. An American jazz pianist and composer, Mary Lou Williams wrote hundreds of compositions, recorded hundreds of songs, and wrote arrangements for musicians, including Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman.

Mary’s Idea is an exquisite picture book about Mary Lou Williams, an artist often overlooked in the canon of American music because of her gender and skin color. With a text full of rhythm and movement and illustrations that sing off the page, Chris Raschka’s picture book is equal parts biography and celebration of the imagination, ideas, and creative process.

Mary’s Idea will find readers in fans of Traci N. Todd’s and Christian Robinson’s Nina, and Brian Selznick’s and Pam Muñoz Ryan’s When Marian Sang.

Includes backmatter.

Red may not know who her true family is, but she’s determined to find out where she belongs, in this story about magic, nature, family, love, and betrayal. There Flies the Witch will enchant fans of Erin Entrada Kelly, Tae Keller, and Grace Lin.

Red doesn’t remember who she is or where she came from. In fact, her only memory is a terrifying, repeating dream of a threatening shadow and a foggy field. But after many years, she wonders if that’s just something she made up.

Red does know that she now belongs with Yakaka, the witch who rescued Red when she was a little girl. Full of power and magic, Yakaka travels the world, healing the planet when it calls for her help. Yakaka carries Red between the wings on her back during these journeys, teaching her the skills of witchcraft, storytelling, and healing—skills Red can never seem to master.

After a dangerous mission leads to Yakaka and Red’s falling from a great height and into the stormy ocean, Red wakes up alone on a seemingly deserted island. Days later, a young boy and his mother find Red and help her recover. For the first time, Red has a friend her own age to play with, and a chance to live a different kind of life. But what happened to Yakaka?

Mayonn Paasewe-Valchev explores themes of family, identity, belonging, and resilience in this truly extraordinary coming-of-age story for readers of Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Lauren Wolk’s Beyond the Bright Sea, and Laurel Snyder’s Orphan Island.

For fans of Kelly Yang and Rebecca Stead, this touching middle grade novel maps one girl’s quest to remember her grandfather through his scavenger hunts; reconnect with her family; and fight for her community in her rapidly changing hometown. Winner of the APALA Youth Literature Award!

Thanks to her Ye-Ye’s epic scavenger hunts, thirteen-year-old Ruby Chu knows San Francisco like the back of her hand. But after his death, she feels lost, and it seems like everyone—from her best friends to her older sister—is abandoning her.

After Ruby gets in major trouble at school, her parents decide she has to spend the summer at a local senior center with her grandmother, Nai-Nai, and Nai-Nai’s friends for company. When a new boy from Ruby’s grade, Liam Yeung, starts showing up too, Ruby’s humiliation is complete.

But Nai-Nai, her friends, and Liam all surprise Ruby. She finds herself working with Liam, who might not be as annoying as he seems, to help save a historic Chinatown bakery that’s being priced out of the neighborhood. And alongside Nai-Nai, who is keeping a secret that threatens to change everything, Ruby retraces Ye-Ye’s scavenger hunt maps in an attempt to find a way out of her grief—and maybe even find herself. 

A young adult graphic novel that captures the complexities of the war in Ukraine, focusing on the siege of Mariupol (Feb ’22 – May ’22) and the brave people who stayed to defend their city against Russian forces as well as the resulting effects on global politics.

A city ruined. In once quiet residential streets, two armies battle, driving people into cellars and basements with little food or water. No lights or heat. Dwindling medical supplies. Shells and bullets deliver cruel, random death to the young and old, men, women, and children. 

This is Mariupol, a Ukrainian city and early target of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Bordering Russian-occupied territory, the coastal city seemed doomed to a defeat that would come within days, if not hours. Could Mariupol, and Ukraine, survive? As Russian rockets threatened the city, Ukrainians resisted, and with a heroic combination of sacrifice and bravery, the besieged city endured . . . for months. But it all came at a steep cost.

With compassion and his keen journalist’s eye, Sibert Honor creator Don Brown illuminates the horrors of Mariupol and the depredations of its people not seen in the city since World War II. He also shows that outside of Mariupol, the city’s agonies were mirrored by similar events occurring in towns and cities across Ukraine.

83 Days in Mariupol reminds us that the bloody defiance shown at the Alamo, Dunkirk, Leningrad, and Thermopylae isn’t confined to the past but has a violent, modern presence. It is the story of senseless destruction, patriotism, and grit against long odds—a brutal battle whose consequences still reverberate across Ukraine and continue to reshape the global political landscape.

Read more books by Don Brown:

• Run and Hide: How Jewish Youth Escaped the Holocaust
• In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers: The Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, Months, and Years after the 9/11 Attacks
• Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918
• The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees

The Haunting of Bly Manor meets House of Salt and Sorrows in award-winning author Kyrie McCauley’s contemporary YA gothic romance about a dark family lineage, the ghosts of grief, and the lines we’ll cross for love.

The Sleeping House was very much awake . . .

Days after a tragedy leaves Marin Blythe alone in the world, she receives a surprising invitation from Alice Lovelace—an acclaimed horror writer and childhood friend of Marin’s mother. Alice offers her a nanny position at Lovelace House, the family’s coastal Maine estate.

Marin accepts and soon finds herself minding Alice’s peculiar girls. Thea buries her dolls one by one, hosting a series of funerals, while Wren does everything in her power to drive Marin away. Then Alice’s eldest daughter returns home unexpectedly. Evie Hallowell is every bit as strange as her younger sisters, and yet Marin is quickly drawn in by Evie’s compelling behavior and ethereal grace.

But as Marin settles in, she can’t escape the anxiety that follows her like a shadow. Dead birds appear in Marin’s room. The children’s pranks escalate. Something dangerous lurks in the woods, leaving mutilated animals in its wake. All is not well at Lovelace House, and Marin must unravel its secrets before they consume her.