Who
Hi I’m Andrea Wickert, millennial mom, book lover, writer, illustrator, and shop owner, living in the Northeast US right in the middle of Upstate New York.
The love of reading to my own child led me back down the path to picture books, paved by my parents long ago. Growing up in a library family, when we weren’t spending our Friday nights running our local library as volunteers we were all curled up in the children’s room happily surrounded by far too many books to carry back home.
What
Library Must Haves is a celebration of our family’s very favorite picture books: some old, some new, most found in the stacks of our public libraries, and some treasures from the shelves of our home library.
My thoughts on books aim to be thorough yet succinct, to get you back to compiling your library holds list just as soon as possible.
You can expect to find…
Picture Book Recommendations from The Book Stacks including:
All the good stuff needed to easily search your library database: title, author, illustrator, publisher
Recommended age levels (spoiler alert: the very best picture books know not the bounds of mere space and time and should be shared liberally with everyone of any age)
Suggested placement in your nightly book stack (another spoiler: nearly all books can fit into a bedtime stack especially if like our family your nights revolve around reading together with stacks often 15-20 books high. There’s a place in there for everything from exciting to lulling, fiction to non, hilarious to poetic…)
Requisite thoughts on the pictures in the picture book
Art posts from The Book Dummy including:
Glimpses into the illustration side of picture books
Sketchbook tours
Art challenge process and results
Live art session round ups and results
A general love of art supplies
When
…in terms of posting, I typically post 5 - 12 book reviews a month with some art interspersed as time and whim allow.
…in terms of inception, in mid 2023, during one of our many, many trips to our beloved local public library (we are blessed to be surrounded by so many wonderful libraries and often hit up 3 - 4 of them in a day) one of our very favorite librarians suggested that if anyone could come up with great reading lists, that it would be me. I was promptly flattered, took the idea, ran straight to Instagram, and as a birthday present to myself started posting my thoughts on picture books interspersed with my own art (the IG grid looks so much better when it’s broken up and it was a fun excuse to put my work out there) and thus Library Must Haves was born on the very same day as me (but a number of decades later).
Where
While it all started over on Instagram, the back library of book reviews is making its way into The Book Stacks and new posts will now be coming over here to Substack, too.
Please feel free to join me on Instagram! I have no plans to slow down over there just looking to connect on another level with all my fellow kid lit creators, readers, appreciators, and genuine aficionados
Over here on Substack I’ll also take the opportunity to build comprehensive reading lists by topic and curate a running list of upcoming releases I’m excited about. In the future I’d also love to post some author & illustrator interviews and tours of book resources in the region from libraries to bookstores to glimpses into our ever expanding home library.
Why
I love all libraries (public, home, little free, school, all of them) and I love everything picture books. I want to connect with others who already share that love and spark that love in everyone else!
Thanks so much for reading Library Must Haves! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Currently all posts are wide open to the free subscription tier with some paid tier subscriber exclusives coming in the very near future.
Connecting with the kid lit community has been such a joy and I truly look forward to getting to know you all! Please pop into the comments and let me know about your favorite picture books, I love to chat!
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