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.
To contact us, please email bookcom@bankstreet.edu.
Children's Book Committee September Pick
Illustrator: Jon Klassen
In 1944 occupied France, Lucas, 13, a kindhearted orphan, finds himself rescuing a litter of kittens, a baby and a racehorse. A spirited action-packed tale full of courage and hope.
Our Young Reviewer Says:
I liked that Lucas thought he was soft and not at all brave, and other people thought that too. They called him Petit Éclair. But then, Alice helped Lucas realize he was brave, because he worked for the Resistance, and he took a baby that was going to be taken away from his mother and cared for the baby, and he helped Alice get her horse to America. All of those make him braver little by little, until people don’t call him Petit Éclair anymore.It shows that you don’t have to be what people think you are or want you to be. You can be whoever you want to be.
–Hannah, age 10, Baltimore, MD