About six weeks into our collective social distancing/parent schooling experiment, I went to the shelf to pick out a few picture books for my first grader to read independently. I found myself rejecting book after book: too much about school, too many friends playing together, too much excitement outside the...

I’ve been writing reviews for The Horn Book Guide since 2005, long before my daughter was born in 2011. When I first started, the reviews were a hypothetical glimpse into what I thought would appeal to children. I was in and out of classrooms during those early years, sometimes sharing...