Best children’s books of 2025 | Best books of the year

In the picture books, Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, the writer-illustrator team behind We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, team up once again for the spirited work Oh Baby, Look What You Got! (Walker), where a shopping trip is marred by rhyming errors (parrot for carrot, snake for cake). It all leads to an increasingly desperate refrain: “Do I want it? No, I want it. I don’t want it. I don’t want it.” no!” Oxenbury’s delightfully expressive combinations of animal and human characters heighten the sense of chaos in this bouncy, cumulative delight, which has all the ingredients of a perennial read-aloud favorite.

Most importantly, Annie Booker’s novel Two Hoots is a haunting, lyrical story about the polar bear spirit that protects the oceans, and the human greed that threatens their rich lives. This beautiful apparition is at once urgent and hopeful, its underdeveloped sea grass and luminous green water contrasting starkly with the black smoke and suffocating cables of crowded fishing nets.

Rashmi Sirdeshpande’s This Is Me (Andersen), illustrated by Ruchi Mehsani, is a poignant celebration of identity that is at once gorgeous and powerful. The child of immigrant parents, “with feet in two worlds,” is at once “little fingers playing the guitar / And the sweet tones of the sitar”; It is the strength to overcome racist resistance, the “courage and patience” of freedom fighters; It is “every page of our shared history.”

Another poetic and delightful picture book for children over 5 is Firefly (Magic Cat) by Robert MacFarlane and Luke Adam Hooker. Hooker’s dense images glow even in black and white, while MacFarlane’s evocative verse guides the reader on a metaphorical journey through the darkness of winter to a field of dreams illuminated by fireflies, and onward through supernovas in a dazzling emission of light and hope (“Be wide, radiant, glowing”).

In nonfiction for kids over 6, this is amazing Omnibird by Giselle Clarkson (Gecko) is not a straightforward guide to ornithology. By looking at 18 species through an original and humorous lens, the book shows their characteristics—chickens’ feathers that are a “shade of apricot jam,” penguins with “secretly very long necks”—in ways that prompt young readers to see birds as complex and funny everyday miracles.

There’s more surreal comedy in Donut Squad: Take Over the World! by Neil Cameron, who will thrill comic fans from eight years old to adults with his fried pastry quest for world domination. Join Sprinkles, the fearless leader with no (honest) secret agenda, and the “funky” Spronky, who fills shoes with mackerel, sprinkles Jammyboi, Anxiety Donut and more in the band’s battles against the aggressive, sugar-hating Bread. With panels full of anarchic humour, unexpected trivia, and colorful absurdities, it’s impossible not to devour this in a sitting.

Set in the world of high fantasy, The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell (Bloomsbury), the second in the Impossible Creatures series, takes readers back to the archipelago, where Anya, the escaped granddaughter of a murdered king, joins Christopher, the keeper of the archipelago’s legendary animals, in a search for justice and the origins of a mysterious poison. Captivating adventures – a rescue of the Sphinx’s back, a library guarded by a harpy, a glimpse of a terrifying future – ensue, while elegant prose and distinctive humor urge the reader to stand up for the weak and the precious, remembering that “love is the greatest weapon against the cruelty of the world.”