2025 Elpy Awards for Children's Literature
Awards season is here, and the various committees convened by the American Library Association to crown the year’s best books for children and teens have spoken. If you’re curious who won, or just want some great recommended reading, lists of the winners and runners up in the library’s print and digital collections have been posted. Each year I give my own imaginary award (called the “Elpy,” from LPL) to books which may not have taken home the Newbery or Caldecott, but have the right stuff for an ever-evolving set of categories. So without further ado, here are this year’s Elpy winners.
Best Book about an Untapped Subject
How to Pee Your Pants, written and illustrated by Rachel Michelle Wilson
We have an entire “Growing Up” section devoted to picture books about early childhood issues, but I’ve never seen a book written to comfort and advise kids who have peed in their pants. And why not? As the book says, “We’ve all been there.” Author/illustrator Rachel Michelle Wilson walks a fine line between humor and practical advice, and encourages readers who didn't have the accident this time to feel empathy for those who did.
Honor Book:
Pepper and Me, written and illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna
Veteran Italian picture book author Alemagna here tells the story of a girl and her first big scab. After her initial disgust, she gets used to her scab, names it “Pepper,” and misses it when it's gone. A quirky, matter-of-fact rite of passage that acknowledges the blessing of a skinned knee.
Best Book about a Tapped Subject
The Table, by Winsome Bingham and Wiley Blevins, illustrated by Jason Griffin
This unusual book is one of my favorites of 2024. It tells the story of a simple wooden table, owned in turn by two families. In the first half of the book, a narrator describes activities on and around the table--the serving of food, the paying of bills, the dying of Easter eggs--depicted solely in close-up views of hands. When the first narrator’s family falls on hard times and moves, they leave the table behind. Tale and table are picked up by a second narrator’s family, and the book becomes a vehicle for showing that even when families differ, what people do around a kitchen table is universal.
Honor Book:
This Table, by Alex Killian, illustrated by Brooke Smart
There were two very good paeans to the family table published this year, and this one is a close runner-up. Killian traces her table back to its humble beginnings as a seed, then follows its construction and life as “the heart of someone’s home.”
Best Book with a Title So Good the Actual Book May Be Unnecessary
Dalmartian, by written and illustrated by Lucy Ruth Cummins
I love a book with a title so good the author may as well have just stopped right there (think Pinkalicious, Millions of Cats, or Pete’s a Pizza). In this case, I’m glad Lucy Ruth Cummins kept going. Dalmartian is the story of a visitation by green-spotted aliens that look like—you guessed it—dalmatians. When one gets left behind, he is adopted by a human child, and, of course, love ensues. This simple story has a real Harry the Dirty Dog vibe, right down to the warm, throwback style of its illustrations.
Best Book about a Dung Beetle
More Dung! A Beetle Tale, written and illustrated by Frank Weber
I struggled to come up with a category for this one, then realized a great picture book about a dung beetle deserves an award just for existing. It’s another first for me, although I have seen a couple of real dung beetles doing their thing up on the Levee Trail (see photo). I don’t know of another creature whose existence seems so symbolic of the toils of daily life. When you see them rolling that big ball of dung, it’s hard not to think of old Sisyphus and his big round rock, and easy to feel a little better about our own problems (“At least that’s not my job”).
This book carries (or should I say rolls with) a strong message of gratitude for the simple things in life: Morning sunshine, a lazy river, a nice fresh pile of elephant poo. Only when our hero gets greedy does he find himself buried under an avalanche of, well, you know what.
Best Book about a Chicken Circumnavigating the Globe
How to Draw a Brave Chicken, by Ethan T. Berlin, illustrated by Jimbo Matison
Amazingly, we have a winner in this category for the seventh year in a row. I’ll admit, this year’s is a stretch. But technically, since the chicken protagonist of this book is launched into outer space in a rocket, and we can assume the Earth continues to rotate while she is up there, she gets credit for a circumnavigation. It’s a cute book about a chicken, anyway, and its creators, as they did in their previous book, How to Draw a Happy Cat, incorporate simple instructions for drawing a chicken, a dragon, a rocket ship, and a few other things kids like to draw.
Best Book about a Bird Who Really Does Fly a Long Way
Springtime Storks: A Migration Love Story, by Carol Joy Munro, illustrated by Chelsea O’Byrne
My all-around favorite book of 2024. Munro’s story, brought to life by Chelsea O’Byrne’s deceptively simple chalk pastel and colored pencil illustrations, is based on a real pair of white storks who nested every spring in Croatia for 20 years, and hatched a total of 66 chicks. The stork mom, Malena, was shot by hunters in 1993, then rescued by a fisherman named Stjepan Vokic. After Vokic nursed the bird back to health and set up a nest for her, a male stork, Klepetan, returned to her every spring from South Africa, a migration of some 8,000 miles. Malena, physically unable to make the journey, stayed in Croatia and lived with her human friend (Vokic also helped her raise all those chicks). She died from old age in 2021, but her stork mate Klepetan still visits her gravesite beneath Vokic’s backyard apple tree when he returns.
If you or your kids crave more of this story than just a picture book, check out videos about Malena and Klepetan here and here. I fell down a wormhole of stork-human love stories recently, and heartily recommend this documentary about another white stork named Yaren, who returns to the same village in Turkey every year to visit his human friend. And if that doesn’t scratch your itch for stories of old men with special bird friends (if you can't tell, I aspire to be one of those myself someday), there’s the story of Dindim, a Magellanic penguin who visited Joao Pereira de Souza every year on Ilha Grande, an island off the coast of Brazil. Their relationship was dramatized in last year's film, My Penguin Friend, and detailed in several recent picture books, The Penguin of Ilha Grande, by Shannon Earle, and The Old Man and the Penguin, by Julie Abery.
SPRINGTIME STORKS: A MIGRATION LOVE STORY
—Dan Coleman is a Senior Collection Development Librarian at Lawrence Public Library.
Explore Past Years of Elpy Award Winners
2022: Don’t Sit Under the Elpy Tree (with Anyone Else But Me)
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