Summer Reads 2025 from Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

Cranky, Crabby Crow (Saves the World)

Corey R. Tabor (Greenwillow)

A stoic-seeming bird on a wire engenders unexpected adventure in this wonderfully surprising picture book. After the corvid rejects a series of friendly creatures, a sudden signal kicks off a high-octane plot turn that brings them all together for a dazzling show. Clever pacing, bone-dry humor, and laugh-out-loud visuals distinguish this entertaining read from Tabor, whose ability to conjure up a fully fleshed-out scenario in just a few strokes contributes significantly to the action.

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Fireworks

Matthew Burgess, illus. by Cátia Chien (Clarion)

Via onomatopoeic prose and sunny multimedia spreads, Burgess and Chien follow two children through a hot city Fourth of July. Events build until the duo climb a fire escape to a roof, waiting together until brilliant fireworks shower the skies. In this joyous seasonal idyll, the creators eloquently capture the city’s sensations, and establish the children’s day as free and expansive, with plenty of time to savor sounds, sights, and “summer on our skin.”

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The Gathering Table

Antwan Eady, illus. by London Ladd (Knopf)

A child recounts a family’s tradition of gathering around a table under a Spanish moss–draped river birch in this artfully rendered picture book that spans numerous events. Eady movingly traces the occasions, highlighting concepts that the table represents. In acrylic paint, cut paper, and tissue paper, Ladd gives each verdant image impasto-like height, elegantly underlining themes “Of love. Of hope. Of pride. Of freedom” as the family comes together again and again and again.

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Next to Me

Daniel Salmieri and Sophia Haas (Rocky Pond)

In an opening collage made of hand-painted paper shapes, a child waves to an adult leading a scooter and two dogs. As the figures head through a city neighborhood, observational text considers the changing landscape (“LINES on the street” prove to be a crosswalk). Succeeding spreads invite readers to look closely, checking what they see against the narrator’s stated perceptions, in Salmieri and Haas’s absorbing picture book look at how a child interprets their surroundings.

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Seven Skies All at Once

Ted Kooser, illus. by Matt Myers (Candlewick)

As two children on facing brick buildings’ rooftops wave across a laundry line, Kooser describes various cloud types as celestial washing hung out by the skies. Altocumulus, cumulus, and more scud into view in thickly stroked art that shows magnificent, billowing shapes dwarfing the buildings and the children. Dramatic visual storytelling from Myers incorporates layers of power and feeling throughout a work of extended metaphor that playfully illuminates cloud forms and their scientific descriptors.

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Sundust

Zeke Peña (Kokila)

When two siblings see a trail of magenta-colored “sundust” streak through the sky, it lands “where no one goes anymore/ ...the galaxy at the end of our street.” Multimedia illustrations cleverly highlight a desertscape as the children head beyond their border city’s rock wall and are pulled into intimate communion with the universe. It’s a wide-ranging solo debut from Peña, and a surreal-feeling exploration of the natural world’s power to endure and transform.

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