Happy Book Birthday: New Middle-Grade, Graphic Novels, and Nonfiction

By Megan Ciskowski, Associate Publicist

Happy Book Birthday to May new releases from Lerner Publishing Group!

The Button Box is a new middle-grade novel about cousins, one Jewish and one Muslim, who travel back in time to ancient Morocco. Below, co-authors Bridget Hodder and Fawzia Gilani-Williams discuss their hopes for the book, what inspired them, and more.

On April 4, during National Library Week, ALA released a list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2021. The YA novel Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez ranked at #4.

Previously on the Lerner blog, Ashley contributed a guest post ahead of Banned Books Week titled “The Right to Read.” In the post she detailed her experience as the author of a challenged book and offered ways educators, parents, and students can resist such challenges.

Since that post there have been more challenges against books in school and public libraries—but there has also been a growing effort to provide librarians, educators, parents, and students with resources to resist these bans. Below, we’ve collected recent coverage of challenges against Out of Darkness, articles on the subject from Ashley Hope Pérez, additional media coverage, and resources from the ALA and others on fighting book challenges in your community.

Click here to see the ALA’s full Top 10 list of banned books and to learn ways of resisting book challenges and embrace the freedom to read.

by Sneed B. Collard III, author of Little Killers: The Ferocious Lives of Puny Predators

I first became fascinated by tiny predators as a biology student at UC Berkeley. I’d been around animals all my life, but taking invertebrate zoology and poking around tidepools made me firmly realize that life on Earth runs on “small” more than “big.”

April 15, 2022 marked 50 days of war in Ukraine. In that time, people around the globe have turned their attention and support to the citizens of Ukraine and Ukrainian populations elsewhere in the world.

Today we’d like to feature the work of two Ukrainian illustrators of Lerner and Kar-Ben Publishing books: Sofia Moore and Yevgenia Nayberg. Learn about each illustrator below and see where you can view more of their work.