MUD TO THE RESCUE! Nonfiction At Its MUDDIEST!

WEB OF LIFE BOOKS, 2025

Take a "down and dirty" look at a delightful and informative new nonfiction picture book. This is a little book with a jumbo title. It presents a seriously important but basic concept in the subtitle:  MUD TO THE RESCUE: How Animals Use Mud To Thrive and Survive. This recent book is written by Tanya Konerman and illustrated by Melanie Cataldo. The boisterous cover illustration suggests a use of mud that we've likely all clicked on as elephants  rollick and romp in mud. 

It's not all fun and games, as this lyrically written, fact-packed book shares with even the youngest audiences. The illustrations range from lively (as the cover) to sleepy (as in hibernating critters) to lounging, as both elephants and hippos are shown to do in those irresistible reels. The text and images reveal that the function of mud ranges from comical to life-saving, with little splashes of informative facts on most pages: 

"Biting bugs are bothersome... ouch!

A nice layer of mud blocks pests and parasites that itch or make elephants and hippos sick."

Mud's role in animal lives (and survival and reproduction) includes being the essential material for nesting (not only for birds!), for home building, for dietary supplement and digestion, and more. These simply-stated nuggets of animal info are kid-sized, in main text and in the "bonus blotch" insets  offered throughout. Back matter provides a simple two-page spread that names each animal discussed followed by a few sentences describing the ways that mud plays an essential role in the lives each creature.

In our part of the world this is the rainy season and plenty of places are getting more rain than they's like, or worse. Even so, after reading this book I'll be looking at mud puddles with a smile from now on. 

WHO HID THE STARS: HOW LIGHT POLLUTION CHANGES THE WORLD

 I wrote about the lovely and lyrical picture book, LIGHTS OUT, when it released in 2020. I hope you'll take a moment to click on that link and read about this remarkably powerful and gently persuasive book. It takes a creative approach to the animals' struggles when light pollution disrupts countless generations of evolutionary adaptations. I highly recommend that title and think of it often, especially during the two seasonal bird migration periods in Spring and Fall. 

If you are reading this as it posts live, you are smack in the midst of a several-week migration of birds from the southern regions to the north. Some birds travel established migration patterns for hundreds of miles, and others whose flyways cross thousands of miles. Science is studying but still has much to learn regarding how those paths remain so predictably consistent, how birds navigate them. Many are birds who have never traveled those paths. What we can do to learn from them, about how they do it, matters. In the meantime, everyone is certain that most birds include moonlight and starlight (yes, stars are used in some sort of magnetic compass orientation) so that LIGHT, of the natural sort, is essential to their success. 

    

EERDMANS BOOKS for Young Readers, 2026

WHO HID THE STARS: How Light Pollution Changes our World is written by Valentina Gottardi, Macie J. Michno, and illustrated by Danio Miserocchi. The translation by Sylvia Notini is masterful in capturing the complex text with a fluency and clarity that serves the authors well. This is a thorough examination of the impact of light pollution not only on birds but on water life, plant life, insects, communication among members of species, and many light's impacts that we directly observe (road kill, bugs zappers, and more) on a daily basis.

A Kirkus review calls the illustration "razzle-dazzle art", and I concur. The back matter and embedded-in-text suggestions for ways to modify our human activities allow young people not only to change their own habits but to become advocates for protection of the night skies. 

To learn more about light pollution, check out 

DARK SKY INTERNATIONAL.

OTHERWISE KNOWN AS JUDY THE GREAT: A Poetic Ode to Judy Blume

CHRISTY OTTAVIANO BOOKS, 20026

 There are countless authors of books for kids, picture books and otherwise, that adults are unaware of. parents and others may recognize the titles of some classics (GOODNIGHT MOON comes to mind, or BROWN BEAR BROWN BEAR), but relatively few adult readers of these books could recall their authors' names. 

But mention the name JUDY BLUME and the percentage of adult recognition skyrockets. Many of those "lightbulb" recognizers will rattle off one or more of Blume's titles that really mattered: to themselves, to their kids, and even to current generations.

Sadly, JUDY BLUME was not yet writing books when i was looking for strories  as a kid. In fact, she was growing up, as I was, in a world that did not offer kids much in the way of current interesting releases. Even Beverly Cleary was barely getting started. 

That, in fact, is partly why she grew up to WRITE books that reflected REAL kids, REAL concerns, and stories that felt like readers' REAL lives. The good news is that those JUDY BLUME books were coming out while I taught reading and literacy with students across many ages. They and I came to know and love her titles. 

NONE of her books were picture books, although she did expand her portfolio to write young adult/teen titles and novels for adult readers.I'm excited to share a picture book poetry biography of JUDY BLUME now, since April is poetry month, and every day is JUDY BLUME Respect Day! (I made that last one up!)

OTHERWISE KNOWN AS JUDY THE GREAT: A POETIC ODE TO JUDY BLUME is written and illustrated by Selina Alko. The award-winning author-illustrator uses a series of poems in different forms to reveal Judy's life, focusing strongly on her early years and family life. Readers find that Judy's close knit family provided safety and security, but it also led her to trying to do things right and BE a good girl,  LITTLE. MISS. PERFECT. Her brother's frequent pranks and boundary-pushing made Judy's self-imposed pressure even greater.

The mid-century life she led is presented on the page with mid-toned, colorful art, offering a sense of warmth and happiness. The illustrations also include collage-effect, scrap-book-style sections of text passages, assembled symbols of her life, and detailed items related to underlying concerns Judy felt as a child. Her "bargaining with God" to achieve a longed-for adventurous life, to help her brother recover from illness, or even to end the war (WORLD WAR II) came back in ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT'S ME, MARGARET. Each poem reveals not only Judy's complex growth and imagination, but also the issues that she later explored in her novels for young readers. 

Many of the poems are titled to convey reminders of specific books she wrote as a mother of two (a boy and a girl). These were stories she wished for in her now childhood, ones she saw her children longing to read. The books she wrote allowed young readers to navigate their own lives, to pursue and contemplate truths. A Judy Blume timeline clarifies content from the poems, paired with a few family photos. Selina Alko's extensive note in back matter reveals the extensive research she did into an author she loved. She lists multiple connections with Judy: being Jewish, loving ALICE IN WONDERLAND and NANCY DREW books, and seeking answers to questions that life presented. Judy's books are frequently listed as BANNED, and Judy continues to work against censorship. 

There are individual poems that can spark lively conversation, but taken as a whole this is biographic journey through the young experiences that fueled an American author everyone should know. The references and further readings in back matter are a great resource, but a doubt they capture and convey JUDY as well as this picture book does. 

THE GALLAUDET ELEVEN: The Story of NASA's Deaf Bioastronauts

Little Brown, & Company, 2026

  I first learned about the remarkable GALLAUDET ELEVEN several years ago when Gallaudet University mounted a fantastic display of their achievements, DEAF DIFFERENCE + SPACE SURVIVAL. If this review or anything about the program catches your curiosity, I urge you to click that  title above and learn more from the wealth of videos, articles, and other resources about these fantastic young contributors to essential space research.

That's what I did at the time when  news was breaking about the G-11 program from fifty years earlier. After watching, reading, and researching more about the program, I contacted two of the original ELEVEN who were active and eager to share the hidden history they had carved. 

During the ensuing years I corresponded and worked with Harry (Sonny) Larson and David Myers, two of the three members of the team who were still alive more than half century after their work ended. Once our manuscript for a picture book was ready to submit, another author had been doing the same research and beat my submissions to a contract. These things happen. Kerry O'Malley Cerra is a multi-award-winning children's author who also happens to be deaf. Her picture book about these unsung heroes released last month. THE GALLAUDET ELEVEN: The Story of NASA's DEAF Bioastronauts is written by Cerra and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann. 

Cerra's approach launches by indicating the excitement and appeal of early space exploration, including students at Gallaudet College (now University).Those students faced disappointment when it became clear that their deafness would eliminate them from applying  as astronauts.Several pages reveal space race pressures, the dangers of motion sickness, and the need for  understanding and treating motion sickness in anyone attempting to travel in space.  The NASA doctor working on this problem visited Gallaudet College to recruit and test  volunteers for immunity from this effect. Some (not all) Deaf people have damage to the vestibular system in their inner ear. This allows them to experience movement without dizziness or nausea. Eleven men qualified and became decade-long volunteers to undergo tests that would-be astronauts would also take, serving as the baseline goal for tolerating the movement without sickness. 

Spinning, swinging, bouncing, zero-gravity, and living in a rotating room involved measuring eye movements, blood work, and comparing accuracy and speed in operating manual devices. All eleven young men had other jobs and often participated during vacations or by taking time away from work and family. Their days were long and exhausting, with complications that none of the NASA crew used ASL, American Sign  Language. But they committed to serving their country and this important program. They continued for more than a decade while America's first manned flights led to the Apollo moon program and the eventually moon landings and exploration. With the current ARTEMIS Moon program well underway, foundational data from  original G-11 studies, along with the medications and adaptations those tests led to, remain the basis for safety for today's astronauts.

Not unlike HIDDEN FIGURES (Black women who made the calculations that assured safety for these flights), the efforts of the GALLAUDET ELEVEN remained unknown to all but a few until the exhibition was finally presented more than fifty years later. Now this new picture book makes the men and their contributions known to generations old and new. More details are found in back matter, along with an introductory letter provided by Barry before his death. I'm excited to say that the book launch was at Gallaudet University and both David Myer and Harry Larson attended and signed stacks of books for their new-found fans. Our goal all along was to document their program efforts in ways that could find readers of any age.

I hope you'll find and read this new book and become as much a fan of these bioastronauts as I am. This was never a "secret" program, but was an underreported aspect of a very glamorous program. Let's all celebrate the men who quietly and generously dedicated themselves to the program because they had, as Harry says, "The difference they needed."