Month: April 2026

Collage art in picture books

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Cover image of Thank You OmuA library patron told me they loved Oge Mora’s artwork in her picture book Thank You, Omu, so I found her some other picture books whose illustrators used collage: Daniel’s Good Day by Micha Archer; Little Penguins by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Christian Robinson; and The Noisy Puddle by Linda Booth Sweeney, illustrated by Miki Sato. Those are some of my favorites I could recommend off the top of my head. But I knew there had to be many more…

One of the things I love about LibraryThing, where I keep track of all my reading, is that the “Review” field is searchable, so any notes I make become part of my personal reading database. I searched for “collage” to remind myself of art I’d liked, and I did find several more!

  • The Story of the Saxophone by Lesa Cline-Ransom, illustrated by James E. Ransome (collage is a particularly brilliant choice for this book because of the way Adolphe Sax pieced together the instrument he created)
  • Bryan Collier uses college in many of his picture book illustrations (e.g. All Because You Matter by Tami Charles)
  • Golden Threads by Suzanne Del Rizzo and Sunny Days by Deborah Kerbel, both illustrated by Miki Sato
  • The Dictionary Story by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston
  • Woodpecker Wham! by April Pulley Sayre, illustrated by Steve Jenkins
  • Stalactite & Stalagmite by Drew Beckmeyer
  • Everybelly by Thao Lam
  • Beansprout by Sarah Lynn Reul
  • Saving American Beach by Heidi Tyline King, illustrated by Ekua Holmes (Holmes has illustrated many others, including Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer and The Stuff of Stars)
  • Farmhouse by Sophie Blackall

Cover image of The Noisy PuddleWhat are your favorite picture books with collage art?

Imagine how a favorite picture book might be completely different if illustrated in another medium. Let’s Be Bees wouldn’t be nearly as effective if Shawn Harris hadn’t used crayon, and Kaya Doi’s Chirri and Chirra books wouldn’t have their delicate charm without those colored pencil illustrations. Do you have another favorite medium – watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, crayon?

March recap

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Unlikely friendships, badass women, and surviving the elements…March was a good month for reading! (Every month is a good month for reading.) And also, we’ve had many days where the temperature was above freezing! Gotta celebrate the small wins.

Picture BooksCover image of Lulu Didn't Want A Dog (a cat looking askance at a dog who wants to play)

  • Bread Is Love by Pooja Makhijani and Lavanya Naidu
  • Lulu Didn’t Want A Dog by Laurel Molk
  • Loops by Jashar Awan

Middle grade

  • Ella Josephine and the Perfectly Imperfect Day by Nina LaCour
  • Midnight Mayhem by Christina Uss
  • Some of Us Are Brave by Saadia Faruqi
  • The Unlikely Tale of Chase and Finnegan by Jasmine Warga (give this to readers who loved Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only series) Cover image of The Unlikely Tale of Chase and Finnegan (a cheetah cub and a dog)
  • When Tomorrow Burns by Tae Keller
  • At Last She Stood by Erin Entrada Kelly

Young Adult

  • Loudmouth: Emma Goldman vs. America (A Love Story) by Deborah Heiligman

Adult

  • Brawler: Stories by Lauren Groff
  • One Aladdin, Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson
  • The Kaiju Preservation Society by John ScalziCover image of The Kaiju Preservation Society
  • A Far-Flung Life by M.L. Stedman (their first novel since The Light Between Oceans in 2012!)

Quotes from books, XV

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This batch of quotes is from some December 2025 and January 2026 reading – picture books, middle grade novels, adult novels, short stories, and nonfiction.

  1.  “I understand how being pleasant can keep the peace, but how will it win a war?” (A Rogue of One’s Own by Evie Dunmore)
  2. Tiph never knew how to be herself. She never knew which part of herself she should be. (The Winter of the Dollhouse by Laura Amy Schlitz)
  3. “The more you know about someone’s life, the harder it is not to like them.” (Fanny’s Big Idea: How Jewish Book Week Was Born by Richard Michelson)Cover image of We Had It Coming by Luke O'Neil
  4. I am not naive she said….It’s just that my stubborn belief in the goodness of people has been so hard to finally and utterly kill off. And it repairs itself like a slowly mending heart. (We Had It Coming and other fictions by Luke O’Neil)
  5.  “All wardrobe and no Narnia” (a variant of “all talk and no action) (The Wheel Is Spinning But the Hamster Is Dead by Adam Sharp)
  6.  “…anybody who tells you to stop asking questions has something to hide. Anybody who tries to keep you from knowing something is afraid of what that knowledge’ll give you. Anybody who tries to make you hate who you are – that’s the only way they’ll stay on top, if you believe you’re weak and small.”(A Time Traveler’s History of Tomorrow by Kendall Kulper)
  7. And she supposed that fear was a thing you got used to in the same way as anything else. Like grief or anger or shame – you either moved past it or you lived with it for so long that you didn’t know the difference anymore. (The Coast Road by Alan Murrin)
  8. Dex realized with a stomach-souring thud that they were standing on the wrong side of the vast gulf between having read about doing a thing and doing the thing. (A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers)
  9. The way you teach yourself to write a novel is by writing a novel. No other art form is like this. (A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken)
  10. The human mind is a very strange thing. It can get used to anything, even continual mortal peril. (The Forest of a Thousand Eyes by Frances Hardinge)