Cindy Derby

"When etiquette coach Ms. Picklepop teeters off her stool and spills a bucket of paint, a creature emerges. Not a scary one, or an evil one, or anything of the sort. Instead, what comes alive is ... BLURP! She'll have to carry on with her lesson, despite Blurp's many, messy distractions. But paint splotches and burps aren't all that disrupt Ms. Picklepop's decorous class. Perhaps through an unlikely friendship, Ms. Picklepop will learn a thing or...

Panda tries to follow a butterfly over a mountain, but the slippery, snowy slope makes it difficult to climb.

"This profoundly moving tale about a grieving boy and an imaginary gorilla makes real the power of talking about loss. On the day of his mother's funeral, a young boy conjures the very visitor he needs to see: a gorilla. Wise and gentle, the gorilla stays on to answer the heart-heavy questions the boy hesitates to ask his father: Where did his mother go? Will she come back home? Will we all die? Yet with the gorilla's friendship, the boy slowly begins...

In this lyrical poem, author John Sobol brings us his imagined vision of a universal experience, that of being born. As she is born, the baby in this story goes through a time of intense movement and change before she takes her first breath and cries. Warm hands wrap her in a blanket, and she is held in loving arms. She has arrived! Sobol captures the mystery and wonder of the birth experience in this deeply sympathetic tale. Reading this book together...