Children’s Book Committee
The Children’s Book Committee (CBC) was founded more than 100 years ago to help parents, teachers, and librarians choose the books that children will find captivating and transforming. Every year it produces comprehensive annotated book lists for children aged infant through 18.
Our Mission
The CBC reviews over 6000 titles each year for accuracy and literary quality and considers their emotional impact on children. It chooses the best 600 books, both fiction and nonfiction, which it lists with annotations according to age and category.
The Children’s Book Committee strives to guide librarians, educators, parents, grandparents, and other interested adults to the best books for children published each year. The list includes more than 600 titles chosen by reviewers for literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.
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Children's Book Committee April Pick
Illustrator: Jeffrey Boston Weatherford
Through free verse, an author seeks and shares the story of her family tree, which has been shaped by enslavement and liberation. Expressive black and white scratchwork illustrations.
Our Young Reviewer Says:
“I liked that the author wrote it in flowing prose and you could really visualize the place that the people were in and at the same time have the fullness of the topic hit you head-on and really make you understand the resistance, the hope, the sadness, the desire for freedom of a people who had and have been oppressed for so long.
I thought that this book was incredibly special because you got a look at so many different perspectives, from the child of an enslaver to the famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass and you were able to see how enslavers tried to make enslaving seem completely okay by deeming enslaved people as “not people the same way they were”, yet enslaved people were filled with hope and a steely resistance that kept them going no matter what and they fought the unfair bonds that they were held under.”
–Maya 12, Boston, MA.