Some authors we love

Oh, it's so hard to write this down, because I'll leave people out. And, because I'm that kind of person, I'm convinced that some author I love will be searching the web and find this list and not be on it, and will feel sad and excluded and it will be All My Fault. Rest assured, it's probably just because the list is not all-inclusive and I forgot, lost in the whims of what Opal happens to have pulled off the bookshelf lately.

New Discoveries

These are authors I didn't read as a kid, but have fallen in love with along with Opal.

Tim Egan

Anthropomorphized animals with good morals, and an odd sensibility. Like Friday Night at Hodge's Café. Sure, thousands of books have been written about accepting people who are different, even when they are scary. But this one has a pie-throwing crazy duck in it. And the tigers have the most magnificent vocabularies.

Susan Meddaugh

More anthropomorphized animals! This time mostly a talking dog, with a very odd biology. These have densely overlaid morals. Hog-Eye for instance has an overt moral about the importance of learning to read (a small pig defeats the big bad wolf by being more literate than he is) but is also about stubbornness (the first four things she tries don't work), avoiding poison ivy, paying attention, recovering from errors, and loving families.

Mo Willems

Mo Willems writes really great picture books, which is nice. But he also writes fantastic early readers, and I mean really early readers, 40-word vocabulary books, and that, that is stunning. Those are incredibly hard books to write unless you're willing for them to be nearly unreadable. Opal will have nothing to do with early readers that she thinks are about learning to read, instead of about being good books.

Jay Williams

I don't know why he's new to me; these books are of an age where I could have read them new. But I don't remember them, and ran into him first when Opal snatched a book at random off the library shelves, a week when almost every book we got was from some author named "Williams", and all because it's next to "Willems". There's more than one author named Jay Williams, and the one we love writes fairy tales (not traditional ones, but stories with princes and dragons and princesses). His characters are original, his language is strong, and his girls and women are even stronger.

Old Favorites

Daniel Pinkwater

I grew up with the stories for older kids, like Lizard Music but learned about the others with Opal. We enjoy the bad bears and Larry a lot.